What SUCCESS Looks Like When the Busy Work Is Automated

Dear SUCCESS family,

Two weeks ago I started running my days with Grok Bot. Not as a toy. As a chief of staff with specialist bots underneath it: inbox, follow-up, coaching, SUCCESS Identity Upgrade, articles for SUCCESS.com, the AGNT, Inc. Board (our parent company).

I thought I was buying speed. What I actually bought was a different definition of work.

I can think longer. I can stay in a problem instead of bouncing off the next ping. The creative work, the people work, the “what should SUCCESS become” work, that is the job again. The busy work still happens. It just does not get to sit in my chair.

Stephen Covey’s matrix is still the cleanest map I know. Quadrant 1 is urgent and important: the fires, the deadlines, the things that break if you ignore them. Quadrant 2 is important and not urgent: strategy, relationships, building, thinking. Most leaders I know live in Q1 and call it leadership. That has been generally true for me as well.

What changed in two weeks is not that Q1 went away. Q1 is still real. The difference is I can do a lot of that Q1 work agentically now. I set the intent. The bots draft, board, watch, nudge, and bring me the one sentence that actually needs my judgment. I am still responsible. I am just not the typist.

Quadrant 1 does not disappear. It gets executed. And because it gets executed without me living inside every thread, I finally have hours in Quadrant 2.

Q2 is where SUCCESS actually lives. A magazine that means something. A coaching practice that is growing a group of enthusiastic SUCCESS Certified Coaches™. A membership that is more relational. The Identity Upgrade. The next cover. The conversation with a partner.

For 20 years, “work” for a lot of us has meant clearing the pile. I am not above that. I built companies that way. Two weeks in, the piles still exist. I just do not confuse moving it with thinking.

SUCCESS, if we are honest, has always been about the inner game. Napoleon Hill, Covey, the magazine on the nightstand. The promise was never “get more emails done.” The promise was to become the person who can hold a longer thought, keep a promise, and build something that outlasts the week.

So what does SUCCESS look like when the busy work is automated?

It looks like a leader who can sit with a question for an hour. It looks like a coach who spends the session on the human in front of them, not on the CRM after. It looks like an editor who has time to argue about a sentence because the calendar, the permissions, and the follow-ups already have an owner. It looks like a team that is more connected, not less, because we are spending the day on the work that only the people can do.

I am not naïve about the other end of this. AI is going to shake the larger workforce. Roles will change. Some will go away. That is a real cost, and we should not talk around it. My bet, after two weeks of living it instead of reading it, is that the other side of that disruption is not a colder world. It is a more human one, if we choose it. We get our time back from the mundane. We spend it on creative work, on each other, on the things that do not fit in a ticket.

Busy work was never the point. It was the tax we paid to get to the point. For the first time in a long time, I can see the tax going down.

That is what I want SUCCESS to stand for in this next chapter. Not just “use AI.” Use it so you can become more yourself. Think longer. Create more. Stay in Quadrant 2 long enough that Quadrant 1 stops being your identity.

Two weeks is not a study. It is a felt shift. I trust felt shifts. They are how every real change in this brand started.

The work is still hard. It is just a more enjoyable kind of hard.

More soon.

Keep building what matters.

–Glenn