Listening Is Power

Why your ability to win depends on what you take in

I called my last Substack post, “You’re Using AI Wrong.” It was confrontational on purpose. The core claim was simple: if you use AI to listen for you, to observe the world for you, you are going to be in trouble. Only after publishing it did I realise the problem.

Most people don’t actually know what that means.

They hear “AI” and they immediately go to tools and prompts and features. They assume I’m talking about productivity or “how to use ChatGPT.” That’s not where I’m pointing. The real issue sits underneath the AI conversation, and if we don’t name it properly, we keep losing the plot.

So for this post I want to step away from AI for a moment and talk about something more basic: listening. Observation. Taking things in. Because I think we all agree listening matters, but we rarely unpack why.

What I mean by “listening”

When I say listening, I’m not only talking about using your ears. I mean taking information in. It can be spoken. It can be written. It can be a sales call, a customer complaint, a textbook, a legal contract, a bank statement, a market shift, a facial expression, an awkward pause in a meeting. It can come through your eyes or your ears. It doesn’t matter.

Listening, in the way I’m using it here, is the act of letting information arrive in your mind so you can digest it and understand it for yourself.

That sounds basic. It sounds obvious. Yet it’s the foundation of everything that makes someone competent.

Why listening has such high status

We treat listening like a moral virtue. We call it “respectful.” We call it “mature.” On the contrary, we say not listening is rude, domineering, selfish, low-grade behaviour.

But we don’t often talk about the deeper reason it has this saintly status. Here’s what I think is going on.

Listening is highly regarded because it is the gateway to understanding, and understanding is the gateway to better outcomes. Better relationships. Better decisions. Better performance. Better results. More power (in the practical sense), not power over people, but power as in competence and control.

Let me make it concrete.

Imagine two friends having a disagreement. One feels hurt because the other did something that didn’t land well. If she reacts without listening, she stays angry, stays ignorant, stays in her own story.

But if she listens, truly listens, she might discover what the other person has been dealing with. Pressure. Grief. Exhaustion. A crisis nobody saw. Suddenly her emotional reality changes. The anger dissolves. Empathy takes its place. The friendship improves. Her own internal state improves. She becomes more tolerant, more grounded, more in control of herself.

That shift came from one act: receiving reality rather than reacting to assumptions. Listening didn’t just preserve the friendship. It preserved her emotional energy and her clarity.

Now take that same mechanism and apply it to learning.

When you go from not understanding something to understanding it, you feel a surge of competence. Think about that precise moment. You feel capable. You feel in charge. That sensation is not mystical. It’s the psychological reward of moving from confusion to clarity, from helplessness to control.

And what is the route from confusion to clarity? You listen. You take information in. You digest it. You build understanding. That is why listening has such status. It reliably increases human capability.

Listening is how you become powerful

This is where I want to be very direct.

If you zoom out far enough, you listen your way to power. Not power as in dominance. Power as in the ability to do something well.

When you understand something, you can act. When you don’t understand something, you can’t. Or you can, but you’ll act blindly and pay the price for it.

Most people underestimate the degree to which competence is simply the result of what you’ve taken in, how well you’ve taken it in, and whether you’ve made it your own.

That is why the most competent people are obsessed with getting information from the right source. They want the raw input, not the softened version. They want to see the numbers, not the story about the numbers. They want to hear the customer, not the summary of the customer. They want to read the contract, not the “high-level overview.”

Because they know, even if they’ve never said it out loud, that their edge comes from the integrity of what enters their mind.

The rainmaker version

Let’s bring this into the world of rainmakers, because this is where it gets practical fast.

A rainmaker is under revenue pressure. Your outcomes are not theoretical. If your understanding is off, your income is off. If your judgment is weak, your pipeline shows it. If your marketing is built on fantasy, your ads burn cash and return nothing. If your customer understanding is shallow, you attract the wrong people, close the wrong deals, and churn the right ones.

In sales, listening is not a soft skill. It is a weapon. When a salesperson asks good questions and truly listens, they gather something priceless: the buyer’s reality. The nuance. The constraints. The priorities. The politics. The fears. The hidden objections. The real decision criteria. The part they will not say if you don’t earn it.

Then a moment happens. You’ve felt it before if you’ve sold anything real. The light bulb goes on and you think: “Now I see it. Now I know exactly why this person needs this. Now I know what they’re trying to protect. Now I know how to frame the solution in a way that fits their world.”

That moment is power. It is the moment you stop guessing. It is the moment the deal becomes solvable. It is the moment your close rate rises because you’re no longer performing, you’re responding to reality.

And that only happens if you listen. If you don’t, you’re left with scripts, assumptions, surface-level objections, and the kind of sales process that looks busy but produces weak results.

Why people don’t listen, even when they “know” it matters

If listening is so powerful, why don’t we do it consistently? Part of it is environmental. Distractions everywhere. Phones. Notifications. Multi-tasking. The modern mind is being trained to switch constantly.

But a bigger part is internal. A lot of people cannot tolerate the silence inside their own mind long enough to let another person finish their thought. They are jumping to conclusions while the other person is still speaking. They are planning their reply. They are thinking faster than the other person talks, so they feel entitled to interrupt.

They don’t mean harm, but the outcome is the same: they don’t actually receive reality. They receive a distorted, partial version filtered through impatience and ego.

Real listening is an active decision. It’s choosing to pause your internal noise and give reality room to arrive. There’s a very simple way to think about it. Communication is an exchange of data. When it’s your turn to send data, send it. When it’s the other person’s turn to send data, stop transmitting and start receiving. That’s the whole game. Simple rules, difficult discipline.

The chain people don’t see

Now we can close the loop back to what I was trying to say in that AI post. Your ability to make good decisions, to adjudicate well, is built on understanding. You cannot adjudicate properly on something you don’t understand intimately.

And here’s the part that’s easy to miss: life is a chain of judgments. Even something as ordinary as placing a coffee cup on a table involves micro-judgments. Distance, force, timing, angle. You do it effortlessly now because you learned it properly. You built competence by interacting with reality directly until the judgments became accurate.

Scale that up. Running a marketing campaign is a chain of judgments. Choosing a segment. Writing an offer. Setting a price. Designing a landing page. Reading the data. Adjusting the message. Cutting the losers. Doubling down on what works.

Flying a plane is a chain of judgments. A surgeon’s work is a chain of judgments. Leadership is a chain of judgments. Parenting is a chain of judgments. Competence is not a personality trait. It is the accumulated accuracy of your judgments over time.

And the accuracy of your judgments depends on the integrity of your inputs. That is why the way you listen, the way you read, the way you observe, is not a lifestyle preference. It is the foundation of your competence.

Where AI becomes destructive

Now we can talk about AI. The danger is not “using AI.” The danger is using AI to intercept your inputs.

If you let AI listen for you, read for you, observe for you, summarise reality for you, you are inserting a foreign layer between your mind and the world. You are letting a machine decide what you should notice, what you should ignore, what matters, what doesn’t, what the person “really meant,” what the customer “really feels,” what the market “is saying.”

And you won’t realise the cost until it’s too late. Here’s a simple analogy.

Imagine installing something into your vision that intercepts how you see the world, shapes it, smooths it, summarises it for convenience, and then presents it back to you as reality. Would you want that? Would you trust AI to tell you what is happening around you over your own eyes?

Yet that’s what people are doing inadvertently. They are taking the most important part of their development, their competence building, their reality contact, and they are outsourcing it.

They think they’re saving time. They think they’re being efficient. They think they’re staying modern. But if you outsource the intake of reality, you weaken the very faculty that makes you valuable. You become less accurate. Your judgment becomes softer. Your decisions become more generic. Your work becomes average, even if it looks polished.

For rainmakers, that translates into very real consequences: poorer offers, weaker positioning, worse ads, lower close rates, missed objections, lost customers, lower income.

This is not an argument against using AI

I’m not anti-AI. I use AI. I like efficiency. I’m obsessed with productivity. But you have to use it in the right place.

Using AI to improve your outputs, the emails you write, the drafts you produce, the assets you design, the way you structure a plan, can be safe and powerful. That’s the outflow side of your life.

The deadly mistake is using it to design your inflow, the information that becomes your understanding, the raw reality that shapes your judgment.

If you are learning something important, studying something important, making a decision that will affect your business or your reputation or your money, you need direct contact with the source material.

You need to listen yourself. Read yourself. Observe yourself. Digest yourself. Understand yourself. Then, once you know what is true, use AI where it shines: to help you apply, test, rehearse, write, and execute faster.

A simple rule to carry into 2026

If you’re a rainmaker, here’s the principle I’m building my work around, and I want you to hold it in your mind: Do not outsource the intake of reality.

Listening is not just polite behaviour. It is the engine of competence. It is how you build the judgment that makes you dangerous in the marketplace.

Use tools to accelerate your execution, but protect the integrity of what you let into your mind. Because once your inputs are compromised, everything downstream is compromised: your judgement, your decisions, your campaigns, your offers, your revenue, your future.

And that’s the difference between someone who stays sharp in the age of AI, and someone who slowly becomes an innocent spectator in their own life.

Make it rAIn, KG