AI Only Does the First One: Saturate, Incubate, Illuminate in Sports Performance

OldBull Performance · Dr Jason Weber

You read the summary this morning. Fifteen pages down to five bullet points, ninety seconds, and by lunchtime you were telling someone you were across it.

You were across the summary.

The part that's genuinely fine, and I'll say it plainly: AI at that job is excellent. It gets you to the information faster than you could get there on your own and it gives you the key points. Use it. I'd go further, you should own AI. Learn what it does, how to control it, how to leverage it. Not to generate rubbish content, but to move faster on work that's actually yours. Nobody is losing their job to AI. You'll lose your job to somebody who can use AI.

Then the part nobody wants to hear.

Pete Blaber, a former Delta Force commander, wrote a book called The Mission, the Men, and Me. He gives three concepts for working in very complex environments: saturate, incubate, illuminate. Saturate yourself with information. Let it incubate over time, develop threads. Illuminate, make the links that turn into formative ideas.

AI does the first one. It does it faster and wider than you can. It does not do the other two. Incubate and illuminate is your brain, connecting the dots, building a system you can create a career on.

Look at what that's done to the feed. Instagram, LinkedIn, God knows what else, barraging you with content of wildly varying quality, most of it generated. Articles about work the writer didn't do. I've got this dashboard, I've got this, I've got that. Only 12 months ago if you put a dashboard up you'd coded it top to bottom. You had to have deep understanding. Now anybody can put anything up.

So the output doesn't tell you anything about the person any more. Which leaves exactly one thing that does: what you can do in front of people.

That's where your ability gets displayed now. Problem-solving with the athlete in front of you. Sitting in a room with a doctor, a physio, an S&C, and reasoning out loud where everyone can hear the connections. You can't do that off a summary. It has to be internalized, part of your operational logic, so it comes out under questioning instead of getting retrieved.

Which means the work is deep, and it's yours, and it's individual. Strength development. Power. Speed. Aerobic versus anaerobic. Clinical reasoning in the rehab domain. And not as separate boxes: the link between aerobic and anaerobic, how that relates to speed, how you generate force sufficient to run fast. The pieces are the easy part. The links are the work.

And take the feed at face value less often. In my own peer groups we go through this constantly, posts with big view counts that don't stand up. They wouldn't survive in the real world.

Use AI to saturate. Then go deep yourself. Incubate it. Make the links. Illuminate. Then go and say it out loud, create a logical argument with a group of peers, with no screen in front of you and not reading from the cheat notes.

Reference: Blaber, P. (2008). The mission, the men, and me: Lessons from a former Delta Force commander. New York: Berkley Caliber.