You're not falling behind on AI. You're in the wrong bubble.

Most business owners haven't even touched AI yet. The "inside" you feel locked out of is much smaller than it looks.

The outsider feeling is a bubble problem

I was scrolling through Substack notes the other morning, the way I do most mornings, when one from Soulful Learning with AI stopped me. She was talking about feeling like an outsider in the conversations. Like she hadn’t been invited to the table.

I sat with that for a minute. Because I’d been feeling exactly that for the last couple of weeks.

The question that had been forming kept poking at me — is Substack turning into another social media platform? All about the likes, the influence, the go-to person? And right behind that question was a conversation I’d had with a friend a few days earlier. About how fast AI is moving. About how easy it is to forget that the corner of the internet you’re paying attention to is just a small slice of a much bigger picture.

That’s when it clicked. The outsider feeling wasn’t about being uninvited.

It was about being in the wrong bubble.

That’s the thing nobody names when you’re feeling behind on AI — sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re behind. It’s that you’re measuring against the wrong bubble.

When the feeling shows up, I pull back

Here’s what I do when the outsider feeling starts to creep in. I pull back. Not all the way out — just back enough to look at what I’m actually consuming and what I’m actually getting from it.

That’s how I found the bakers.

And the digital creators. The illustrators. The graphic artists. The entrepreneurs in completely different industries doing completely different things.

These people aren’t in the AI conversation. They’re not pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with agents or vibe coding or whatever the new term is this week. They’re just doing their own thing. Sharing what they’re working on. No comparison games. No visibility chasing. Just here’s what I made today.

Those are my people. The ones looking inward at what they need, and sharing it outward without performance.

It reminded me of how I run my experiments — not to show off a polished result, but to show the actual mess. The wrong turns. The things that didn’t work. No bow on the package. Just here’s what I tried, here’s what happened, here’s what I’d do differently.

That’s the kind of content I want to read. And the kind I want to make.

Hi, I'm Lee. I help solo business owners get clear on AI and automation decisions before they commit — no hype, no hustle, no borrowed playbooks.

New here? Find the room that fits → No Foundation Yet → Lost In Translation → Built For Someone Else → The Last Mile

The visible bubble isn’t the whole room

Here’s what I think a lot of us are missing. The small group of AI thought leaders who feel like the whole conversation? They’re not the whole conversation.

They’re a bubble. A loud, visible, very publicly engaged bubble. They’re talking to each other, building on each other’s work, referring each other, pushing each other. From the outside it looks like an exclusive club. From the inside it’s just a small group of people who happen to be jazzed up by the same thing at the same time.

But here’s the part I keep coming back to — most business owners haven’t even touched AI yet. Not from a prompting standpoint, let alone agents or building or vibe coding. Most are still running tried-and-true processes that have worked for years and aren’t quite ready to make the jump.

So the “inside” you’re feeling locked out of? It’s a tiny corner of a much bigger room.

Think about a horse race for a second. You watch the horses come around the track and it feels like the whole sport is in front of you. The jockeys, the horses, the finish line.

But that’s not the whole operation. There are owners. Veterinarians. Stable hands. Trainers. The people who feed and walk and care for those horses every day.

They’re not on the track — but the race doesn’t happen without them.

The visible racers aren’t the whole game. They’re just the part you can see.

Swap the blinders for earphones

Here’s the move I keep thinking about.

When a horse races, they put blinders on. Blinders narrow the field of vision so the horse doesn’t get distracted by what’s happening on either side. Just the track ahead. Just the lane.

That’s what most advice tells you to do when you’re feeling behind. Stay in your lane. Don’t worry about what they’re doing. Focus.

But blinders cut off your vision. You stop seeing what’s around you. You stop noticing the bakers and the digital creators and the entrepreneurs in other industries doing things you might actually want to learn from.

What I want instead is earphones.

Earphones cut down the noise. They don’t narrow your vision. You can still see the whole field — you just turn down the volume on the comparison and the pressure and the I-should-be-doing-what-they’re-doing. You stay aware. You stay curious. You just stop letting the noise drive your decisions.

That’s the shift. Vision wide. Volume down.

What I actually changed about how I read AI content

I want to be specific about what I did, because the philosophy is easy and the practice is the part that actually moves anything.

I cut my AI reading down to the top three or four people. The ones whose work consistently teaches me something I can use, not the ones who make me feel like I’m falling behind. I didn’t unsubscribe from anyone — I just stopped opening everything. Made room.

Then I expanded. Bakers. Illustrators. Graphic artists. Entrepreneurs in industries I’m not in. Small businesses doing things differently.

I went from one bubble to several different ones, and I read all of them in small doses so no single voice gets too loud.

And I stopped — really stopped — comparing what other people were building. The cool things. The boundary-pushing. The “look what I made with this brand-new tool” posts. I let those exist without making them mean anything about what I should be doing.

What replaced the comparison was a different question. What’s one thing I can do today to move my business forward, in a way that makes sense for me and how I actually work?

That question gets me further in twenty minutes than two hours of scrolling ever did.

The question for you

I know this piece is different from what I usually write here. That’s part of why I wanted to write it. Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is step back from the build logs and the experiments and just name what’s actually happening underneath.

So here’s the question I want to leave you with.

If you stopped trying to break into the bubble that’s making you feel outside — who would you read instead?

Sit with that one for five minutes. Look at your feed. Look at who you open every time and who you skip. Look at who you compare yourself to and who you actually learn from.

The outsider feeling is real. It’s just usually pointing at the wrong problem.

You’re not on the outside of the conversation.

You’re just in a different bubble. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you’re sitting with this and realizing you’ve been trying to break into a bubble that wasn’t built for you — that’s the kind of clarity work I help solo business owners do. tidycal.com/diginav if you want to think it through together.