Monday evening was th last game of the regular season (I’m a huge fan of our local team 😉)

I’m watching Erik Brännström and for a few seconds, he’s back.

At the start of the season, he was playing like the game was on fast forward: faster than everyone, sharper and Something alive in the way he moved.

Then the whole season, he leveled. Game after game: competent, solid, fine… Yet average.

But Monday night, for just a few seconds, the real him came back.

And I thought: what happened to that? What did the system do to him?

The next morning, I was listening to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon on Joe Rogan. January 2026. And Affleck said something simple about AI:

“It goes toward the average. That’s its nature. It’s trained on patterns that tend toward the statistical center.”

I stopped.

Because I’ve been watching that same phenomenon for years — not in AI, but in organizations, in teams (whatever teams are) and in the entrepreneurs I work with.

Open LinkedIn, or Insta, on any given day. Every post starts with the same hook, the same three-point structure and the same careful, optimized, AI-assisted voice that sounds like everyone and no one at the same time.

Two systems. One built from code and the other one built from people. Both doing the same thing.

Here’s what nobody talks about.

We’ve built organizations optimized for one thing: reducing variance: predictable, safe and of course manageable.

And in that same world, we’ve built AI optimized for one thing: performing the average.

The problem? What gets compressed in both systems is identical.

The intuition, the aliveness, the thing that makes a person — or an idea — unrepeatable.

And it’s not always the manager who does the work of normalization. Teams do it to themselves. When one person performs too high, they create an invisible pressure on everyone around them. Brännström didn’t slow down alone. His environment helped him without even knowing it.

I know this from the inside.

Years ago, I went through an Insights profile analysis. The coach looked at my results and said:

“You make a lot of noise. You take a lot of space. Be careful — it can disturb people.”

So I tried to turn myself off. For years.

And one day I was at my osteopath’s office, reaching for a hanger on the rack — I knocked everything down.

You cannot turn yourself off. You just get hurt trying.

AI now performs the average better than any average human ever could.

Which means what’s left — what cannot be replaced — is exactly what systems spend their time compressing.

The intuition that arrives before the analysis. The connection nobody else makes. The truth that costs something to say.

Protecting that — in yourself, in your team — is no longer a question of humanism.

It’s a question of survival.

The organizations that keep averaging their humans are not preparing for a future with AI. They’re preparing to be replaced by it. Because they’re already producing the same thing — less effectively, and at a higher cost.

So I want to leave you with 2 questions.

1 - Do you see your genius as your responsibility, something you owe the world?

2 - Can you hold the cost of someone else’s genius? Because if you can, you become the environment where brilliance actually survives.

The future needs whole people, not well-calibrated ones!

That’s what I wrote Being Is the New Doing for: a permission to stop compressing yourself.

If you recognize yourself anywhere in this story — in Brännström, in the coat hanger, in the LinkedIn scroll — this book was written from that exact place.

It’s available soon on Amazon. You can preorder it now.

Valérie

Get full access to The Awakened Entrepreneur at demontvalerie.substack.com/subscribe