The best business question I’ve picked up this year didn’t come from a sales book or a leadership podcast.

It came from quantum physics.

“What else could be true?”

Here’s how I got there.

A few months ago I was scrolling my stock portfolio.

NVIDIA. Up again.

I kept seeing the word semiconductor and realized I didn’t really know what it was. Turns out, it’s the item the modern world runs on. Little pieces of silicon doing the work of making every AI model, every LLM, every app on your phone possible.

The companies making them have posted some of the most explosive revenue and valuation stories of the past generation. [1]

So I started pulling the thread. What does it actually mean that we suddenly need this much computing power?

AI doesn’t run on one computer. It runs on hundreds of computers nested inside of other computers, stacked inside centralized machines, stacked on top of even more. [2]

Entire real estate development projects are now built around data centers. Campuses of nothing but processing. [3]

Some of them are generating so much heat that they are measurably warming the air around them. [4] Compute so dense it’s literally changing the temperature of the regions they sit in.

We’re physically reshaping the environment just to keep up.

So I kept asking, what’s the next horizon?

The next frontier is quantum computing.

And the more I’ve read, the more I think the paradigm behind quantum has something to teach every one of us. About leadership. About sales. About business. About how we show up in our own lives.

Here’s what I mean.

The binary world we live in

Every computer you’ve ever touched, your laptop, your phone, the servers running AI, operates in one paradigm. Binary.

Ones and zeros.

Every calculation, every email, every LLM output is ultimately reduced to 1s and 0s racing through silicon at absurd speeds.

That’s been the paradigm for about 80 years. [5] It’s extraordinary. But it has a ceiling.

What quantum actually is

Quantum computing breaks the paradigm.

Instead of a bit that’s either 0 or 1, a qubit can be both 0 and 1 at the same time.

Think of a coin spinning in the air. Mid-flip, it isn’t heads. It isn’t tails. It’s both. The moment it lands, it collapses into one state. Up until then, it holds every possibility at once.

Quantum computers don’t think in binary. They think in probabilities. All realities simultaneously.

The bet is this. If we can unlock stable quantum computers, problems that would take classical machines thousands of years can be solved in minutes. [6] Calculations with near infinite combinations (drug discovery, cryptography, logistics, climate modeling) become tractable in ways they’ve never been before.

But for quantum computers to work, they have to maintain something called superposition.

The fragility of superposition

Superposition is where the magic happens.

And it’s extraordinarily fragile.

Qubits have to be cryogenically cooled to near absolute zero, colder than deep space, and isolated from virtually all outside interference. [7]

You can’t even measure a quantum computer while it’s computing. The moment you observe it, the superposition collapses. All those simultaneous realities crunch down into one.

It’s Schrödinger’s cat. The cat in the box is both alive and dead until you open the lid. The act of looking is what forces a single reality into being.

Fragile. Invisible. Both things at once, until it isn’t.

The physics is interesting. The thinking pattern underneath it is what I actually want you to take away.

Now here’s where it gets interesting

When I sat with all of this long enough, I realized something.

We live in binary.

Good or bad. Win or lose. Happy or sad. Made money or lost money. Deal closed or deal died. Prospect is hot or prospect is cold.

We default to two options. It’s how our brains work. It’s how we make decisions fast.

But most of reality isn’t binary.

Most of reality is superposition.

A lost deal is a dead deal. And it’s a relationship that might close in 14 months. Both are true.

A bad quarter is a signal you’re failing. And it’s data telling you what to build next. Both are true.

A difficult hire is a mistake. And it’s the push that finally makes you document your process. Both are true.

The binary reading of your life and business is almost always incomplete.

What else could be true?

This is the question I’ve been sitting with lately. The one I think changes everything.

What else could be true?

Not “left or right.” Not “this or that.” Not “succeed or fail.”

What else could be true?

That question is how you unlock superposition in your own thinking. Instead of forcing yourself into one of two narratives, you hold multiple realities in the same moment. And let the best move emerge.

Great leaders do this naturally. They don’t collapse the possibilities too early. They sit in the tension.

Great salespeople do this. “No” isn’t no. “Not now” isn’t never. The deal isn’t dead. It’s in a quantum state, and your job is to keep it there long enough for the real answer to emerge.

Great operators do this. The problem isn’t just a problem. It’s also a product idea. It’s also a hire you need to make. It’s also a signal about your org chart. All of those are true simultaneously.

Binary collapses the field. Superposition expands it.

The takeaway

I’m not suggesting we all pretend to be physicists.

But the paradigm underneath quantum computing is one of the most powerful mental models I’ve come across in a long time.

The world’s smartest engineers are spending billions to build machines that can hold more than one reality at a time.

Maybe we should too.

The next time you catch yourself framing something as binary, ask the question.

What else could be true?

❧

References

[1] In June 2024, NVIDIA briefly surpassed Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, crossing a $3 trillion market cap on the back of AI-driven GPU demand. Source: Reuters, “Nvidia overtakes Microsoft to become world’s most valuable company” (June 18, 2024).

[2] Frontier AI training runs now span tens of thousands of interconnected GPUs distributed across multiple data centers, with training jobs for state of the art models consuming compute that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Source: International Energy Agency, “Electricity 2024: Analysis and forecast to 2026.”

[3] Data center construction is one of the fastest growing commercial real estate sectors in the United States, with record leasing activity in Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Dallas, and other hubs. Source: CBRE, “Global Data Center Trends 2024.”

[4] Data center campuses have been shown to generate thermal plumes and raise local ambient air and water temperatures. Studies have documented measurable warming effects in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” and in regions of Ireland hosting hyperscale facilities. Source: Bloomberg, “AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc on Global Power Systems” (2024); IEA “Electricity 2024.”

[5] ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, came online in 1945. The first practical stored program binary architectures followed in the late 1940s, cementing binary as the foundation of modern computing. Source: Computer History Museum archives.

[6] In 2019, Google’s Sycamore quantum processor completed a benchmark task in roughly 200 seconds that the team estimated would take the world’s fastest classical supercomputer about 10,000 years (IBM later argued the real figure was closer to 2.5 days, which is still an extraordinary gap). Source: Arute et al., “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor,” Nature 574, 505–510 (2019).

[7] Superconducting qubits used by IBM, Google, and other leading quantum programs are typically cooled to around 15 millikelvin (approximately -273.135°C), colder than the 2.7 K background temperature of deep space. Source: IBM Research, “What is quantum computing?”