On the dangers of polished mediocrity and why the most relentless person in the room will always outperform the most refined AI output.
I have a huge pet-peeve about professional sports today.
So often I find myself in conversations with people reminiscing about 90s basketball or early 2000s baseball. And I can’t help but notice a consistent theme. People miss the days when the games were “scrappy”, “intense”, “dramatic”, and athletes really “put themselves on the line” or “gave the game their all”. And I’ve identified one common denominator that bridges the view of these fans and myself: the game today lacks hustle.
This issue of the Catalyst goes out to all the hustlers. The folks that go in every day and put in the real, impactful work, especially in the age of AI. If you’re not familiar with hustle or how it can affect beneficial change in the workplace, let me introduce you to Tim Locastro.
Tim Locastro was never going to be a star baseball player. He was a 13th-round draft pick out of a Division III school in upstate New York. He didn't hit for power. He wasn't going to anchor anyone's lineup. By every traditional metric he was replacement-level, the kind of player teams cycle through and forget. But the man could hustle like nobody else.
Over a seven-year career, Locastro turned hustle into a competitive advantage. He stole 29 consecutive bases without being caught to start his career, an MLB record. He clocked sprint speeds in the top 1% of the league. He even led the majors in being hit by pitches, and that was completely by design. He chose to crowd the plate, absorb the bruise, and use his speed to create havoc on the basepaths. When he got on base, he was a pest. Beloved by his teammates; loathed by the opposition who knew he could wreak havoc whenever he got on base. Every single play, whether he was starting or coming in as a late-game defensive replacement, was treated like Game 7 of the World Series.
So why am I writing about a baseball player that you’ve likely never heard of? What does Tim Locastro have to do with your business? The same quality that made Locastro extraordinary, that relentless, creative, resourceful effort applied to every small moment, is the same thing that separates great marketing and strategy teams from mediocre ones. And as AI reshapes the way we all work, I believe it's the one quality that becomes more valuable over time, not less.
In May 2025, researchers at the Wharton School published a study in Nature Human Behaviour. Professors Gideon Nave and Christian Terwiesch, along with Mack Institute research fellow Lennart Meincke, found that while ChatGPT improved the quality of individual ideas, it dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas across a group. The individual outputs were good, often great; but the collective output was all the same.
In one experiment, participants were asked to invent a toy using a fan and a brick. Among those using AI, nearly every suggestion clustered around the same concept. Only 6% of AI-generated ideas were considered unique. In the human-only group? 100% were unique.
As Terwiesch put it: “If you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other.”
AI makes your individual work product better, but it also makes your team's collective thinking narrower. That's just how large language models (LLMs) work. They converge on the statistically most likely output. So, if you run the same prompt across ten people on your team, you're going to get ten polished versions of the same idea.
This is happening inside companies right now. It's a strategy problem, a marketing problem, and an innovation problem all at once. When AI tools are commoditized, everyone starts thinking alike. But human intelligence, institutional knowledge, and hustle provide the real unique value.
This tension isn't new or unique to AI. We've been here before.
In 1947, Bill Bernbach, who was Creative Director at Grey Advertising at the time and went on to co-found DDB, wrote an internal letter to his agency's leadership. He warned that the advertising industry was filling up with people who knew all the rules and techniques but had lost the capacity for genuine creative thinking:
“It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things … The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.”
His take was telling: these ‘creatives’ could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules. Now swap ‘advertising rules’ for 'AI-generated best practices' and the parallel is almost eerie. The danger Bernbach called out, that creeping obsession with technical skill that gets mistaken for creative ability, is the exact trap the Wharton research quantifies nearly eight decades later. The tools get better. The techniques get more sophisticated. And the creative spark, the genuine differentiation, gets quietly squeezed out.
Bernbach's conclusion still holds. Technique matters (as it always will), but the creative spark, the willingness to try something that can't be defended on the basis of what's worked before, the instinct to go with the idea that has no precedent in the data is what makes work remarkable. Those instincts, in my opinion, often derive from a specific kind of person.
“I want people who do inspiring things … The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.”
— Bill Bernach
Let’s go back to Tim Locastro. His story is a useful framework for understanding the kind of contributor every team needs.
Locastro didn't have the raw tools of an All-Star. Rather, he had this extraordinary ability to find value in places nobody else was looking. He studied pitchers' timing obsessively. He noticed the half-second hesitation in a pickoff move that created a window for a stolen base. He was willing to let a 95-mph fastball hit him, because he understood that getting on base by any means necessary created opportunities his speed could exploit.
That's hustle. Not performative busyness or glorification of the grind. Intelligent, relentless resourcefulness applied to every business problem. It's the accumulation of observations, relationships, experience, specialized knowledge, pattern recognition, and effort that lets someone see an opportunity another person or AI tool misses.
In a marketing or strategy context, the hustler is the person who doesn't wait for the brief. They've already talked to three customers, read the competitor's latest earnings call, and found the tension the team hasn't articulated yet. They’re always asking, “So what?” to find the deeper tension and craft the strategies and messaging that truly resonate. That's the real promise of AI for creative and strategic work: not replacing the hustle required to find the signal in the noise, but giving the hustler dramatically more leverage once they've found it.
The hustler is the antidote to the convergence problem the Wharton researchers identified. When AI pulls everyone toward the statistical center, you need people in the room who are incapable of staying there.
This is why the Wharton researchers recommended starting brainstorms with human ideas before introducing AI. The creative diversity must exist in the room first. AI can sharpen and enhance existing capabilities; it cannot create them.
The most important talent decision you'll make in the next two years is how you'll build “hybrid intelligence,” the deliberate pairing of AI's processing power with the kind of human creativity, judgment, and hustle that no model can produce on its own.
Now hybrid intelligence sounds clean on paper. In practice, it's messy. It requires leaders to make specific, sometimes uncomfortable choices. Here's where I'd start.
Hire and empower hustlers. Look for the people who do the unglamorous work: the research nobody asked for, the customer conversation that happened because they picked up the phone, the connection between two data points that didn't come from a dashboard. These are the people who create the raw material AI can't generate on its own. In my experience, the best teams are built around a core of people who refuse to accept the first answer and who understand that genuine insight requires effort that simply can't be delegated.
Protect creativity like a strategic asset. The Wharton researchers were explicit about this: diversity of thought doesn't happen by default, especially when AI is involved. You have to design for it. That means varying the inputs, using different prompting approaches, pulling from different models, and most importantly, creating space for the human idea that doesn't pattern-match to anything AI would suggest. As Terwiesch advised, the cost of varying your approach is low, and the stakes of not doing it are enormous.
Keep AI in the workflow, but not in the driver's seat. Use it to pressure-test arguments, organize research, draft options, and identify blind spots. But the strategic judgment, the read on what's different about your challenge, what the customer really needs, what risk is worth taking, that has to come from people who've done the real work to earn that judgment. Bernbach was right in 1947. The technology may change, but the source of differentiation doesn’t: distinctive thinking from people willing to do the work.
Value the intangibles. Tim Locastro's value didn't show up in a traditional stat line. The hustlers on your team, the ones who find the overlooked insight, who ask the uncomfortable question, who refuse to ship work that merely satisfies the brief, those people create disproportionate value precisely because what they do can't be systematized. In a world where AI commoditizes the first 80% of every task, the last 20%, the effort, the creativity, the judgment, is where all the differentiation lives.
Bernbach concluded his letter by saying, “If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality.” The same principle applies in the age of AI. Maximizing the value of hybrid intelligence in your company depends on putting the right people behind the tools—the hustlers—then using AI to amplify what makes their thinking distinctive in the first place. Because when everyone has access to the same technology, the hustlers become your durable competitive advantage.
Find those people. Empower them. Because you can't automate hustle.
