The Counterintuitive Way to Master Any Leadership Skill

Einstein Was Right: Stop Reading So Many Books

Dec 23, 2025

I nearly botched my engineer’s promotion. In a large conference room full of managers and directors, I answered question after question about my engineer’s performance. Slowly, subtly, the atmosphere in the room changed. They did not approve the promotion.

After the meeting, on the walk back to my office, a senior-manager tagged along and gave me some feedback. They said the problem was that I didn’t project confidence during the meeting. I pushed back, saying that how I presented shouldn’t influence the decision. They smiled and said that they wished it were true. Instead, in the world we live in, how we present matters. That’s why they practiced in front of a mirror for an hour before every promotion review.

I coached my engineers that their work wouldn’t speak for itself. That they need to advocate for themselves. And here I was, failing them because I didn’t speak with confidence about their work. I failed them.

I should have known better. There was another promotion review I had attended. In it, the consensus in the room slowly coalesced into waiting another cycle. That is until an IC8 pushed us managers to reframe how we viewed the case. It wasn’t just what they said or even their level. I still remember the clarity with which they communicated. The calm confidence behind their words.

Communicating clearly matters not just in promotion reviews. I rambled the first time I presented in an executive review. I stated my point and then continued to restate it three more times from different angles. It’s not just a waste of time; it’s a confidence killer.

I was able to salvage my engineer’s promotion through hours of after-hours work. Afterwards, I decided I had to improve my speaking skills. My personal growth journey started, as it usually does, with books. Big mistake.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
-- Albert Einstein

Reading is a passive activity. Luckily for us, LLMs can help us turn passive reading into behavior building. In this post, I’ll share how you can leverage AI to build your skills. Throughout the post, I’ll use the example of building your communication skills as a concrete example.

Let’s walk through how you can build your communication skills using AI in 2026. We’ll use Jefferson Fisher’s “The Next Conversation” as an example. You can replace it with your favorite communication resource. It doesn’t have to be a book. This method works great for blog posts, YouTube videos, and online courses.

I call this method the SCRIPT method: Skim, Commit, Record, Instantiate, Practice, and Tailor.

Skim for the skeleton

The first step that you should take when starting a new book is to skim from start to finish. Understanding the overall structure of the book will help you read and ingest the information more effectively. Beyond understanding the general structure, you can make an educated guess about how this book can transform you.

Taking “The Next Conversation” as an example, the book starts with some general principles and ways of thinking about human interactions. It then continues with tactical advice or algorithms that you can use in various situations. There’s much more to it, but that’s a good approximation for the initial scan.

Commit to one change

Reading for reading’s sakes is a waste of time. Even when you’re reading fiction, you’re actually reading it to experience an emotional transformation. For practical books, the aim is to undergo a knowledge or skill-based transformation.

Unfortunately, just like reading most works of fiction, we experience a temporary transformation when we read most books. A few months after reading the book, we only vaguely remember what it was about. We make the exact mistakes that the book tried to prevent. Most often we don’t even notice, because we completely forgot about it.

The secret to lasting transformation starts with intention. With making a commitment. Choose one specific way you will change. One transformation.

The real purpose of the initial skim stage is to help you find and choose this change. It’s fine if you change it as you study the book. It’s not fine to read the book without a clear commitment.

In our example, the change can be clear: build executive presence.

Record in your own words

Now it’s time to read the book. As you’re reading, take notes. Don’t just highlight passages or copy quotes. Write the key insights using your own words. Use your own lived experience. When the author uses one example, switch it with an authentic example that happened to you.

Taking notes is critical. It shifts your brain from passive consumption to a more active mode, which is great for retention. It also helps you capture the data that you’ll use to build your AI agent. Even if an LLM was trained on the book you’re reading, it won’t know what parts were insightful for you. It won’t know how the insights connect to your own experience.

For me, I typically take notes in Obsidian. You can use Notion, Notes, or hand-written notes. Yes, taking notes by hand is great again. Multi-modal LLMs will read your messy handwriting and diagrams.

When Jefferson talks about writing your own manual, I used README in my notes. After reading Oren Ellenbogen‘s articles on writing your manager readme, this term holds a deeper meaning for me. This is just one example of taking notes to resonate with me.

Instantiate your AI coach

This was the end of the learning journey until LLMs came along. With the latest AI advancements, you can now make your own customized AI coach.

Don’t stress too much about writing the perfect prompt. Start a new chat window, let the AI know you want to create a coach for whatever skill it is you want to develop. Then, share your raw notes and ask the AI to help you turn them into structured data you can use as context for the coach. Finally, ask the AI to help you write the system prompt itself.

To fire up your AI coach, just paste the system prompt together with your now-structured notes, together with whatever you’re currently doing. You take it up a level by creating a dedicated project, building a Claude Artifact, or vibe-coding a bespoke tool.

What can AI offer?

Here’s an example. In one chapter, Jefferson Fisher gives a list of 10 specific ways to speak more assertively. The AI can take the transcript of the conversation you just finished and give you feedback on how you could communicate more crisply.

Practice until its permanent

The most common mistake when using the SCRIPT method is to create the AI and use it whenever you remember that the tool exists. Real transformation does not happen in one aha moment. Rather, it’s the result of persistent and continuous progress. It requires practice.

You should integrate your new AI tool into your daily life. Spend five minutes after each conference call using it to get fast feedback. Or practice at the start of each day: ask the AI to throw questions at you, see how you respond, and then provide feedback. Do this for five to ten minutes daily for a month; I promise you’ll be astonished when you go back and watch your early recordings.

This is another reason reading fifty books a year is a fool’s errand. You need time to practice and internalize what you learn. Spend at least a couple of weeks practicing the key skill, the key commitment, that you took for each book before moving on.

Tailor your tool

Don’t create separate AI coaches for every book that you read. Instead, create one AI coach for each of your growth areas. Seed the initial AI from the first book that you read on the subject. As you read new books, update the existing tools.

Building strong in-person communication skills takes months and years to master. As you continue your education, ask the AI to ingest your new notes into your structured context. Prune out tidbits that you have already mastered and don’t provide as much value anymore. The tweaks tailor the tool.

Summary

When you transition from engineering to engineering management, you have to learn a completely job. There’s a broad range of new skills that you need to master.

The rapid rise in the capabilities of AI has unlocked new ways of learning rapidly. This is something I’m very excited about. Not just in my personal growth, but also in how I teach and coach managers. In past cohorts of Build Your Engineering Management OS, I was limited in how much lasting change I could offer for students. With each cohort, the level of skill-building tools I can offer goes up. The cohort starting in January 2026 is already packed with an entire AI toolset.

You don’t have to join the cohort to get these tools. With the information in this post, you can start building your own tools from scratch.

To recap, here are some of the non-trivial points to remember: