Neve Campbell is acting her ass off.

That was the unadorned thought I had watching Scream this Halloween (a tier one Halloween watch we can’t go a year without).

That’s not to say I think her a great actress, moreso that she left it all out there. Just like the rest of the cast (and writers) of that film, she didn’t pull her punches. Without her performance, would I watch Scream (at least the original) ten times per decade?

It’s hard to say.

But that performance struck a chord and got me thinking about the ingredients for creating something unique. Whether that’s unique for ourselves or commercially (a big distinction behind the curtain of artistic endeavor).

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Deep down, I think there’s a case to be made that uniqueness is at the core of art, but I’m more interested in the foundational task of creating something that someone else can’t. Which is an easy thought in principal, but in practice involves:

• Abandoning the labels of good and bad

• Keeping commercial viability at arm’s length

• A strongly cultivated set of micro-habits while creating

Let’s start with the fact that…

There’s no absolute good

There is commercially viable and not commercially viable, but good versus bad is not a factor in it. And while I think trying to find an absolute form of good and bad is detrimental to me as a creator, there are **helpful proxies for it:

• Work I’m proud of versus work I’m not

• Work that’s authentic (to me) and work that’s not

• Work that feels complete versus work that doesn’t

And whatever our medium, those are always spectrums we can operate on (and ones that are a hell of a lot more meaningful than good or bad). But whatever one we operate on deeply impacts our own sense of better or worse.

So deeply in fact, that this spectrum becomes the ONLY factor in whether a piece of work succeeds or fails in our mind. Unless we also think in terms of commercial viability.

**You’ll notice the concept of taste is absent. I consider taste a factor of consuming, not creation. And the further we intricate taste into creation is the more we chip away at uniqueness.

When we choose to think in terms of commercial viability

Not everyone who creates chooses to think in terms of commercial viability. But anyone who hopes to benefit off their works does.

Like an author does when they wade into the world of publishing, self or otherwise. Or a band does the second they upload a track to Spotify. It doesn’t have to be money. It could be for visibility. It could be for notoriety. It could be the sake of the challenge.

But when we do choose to think of it, commercial viability presents a second spectrum on which we’re forced to think about our art.

And when we add this to our adopted sense of good or bad, it’s not just a spectrum anymore. If you create for ANY OTHER REASON in addition to commercial viability, then your landscape for evaluation is a grid, not a spectrum.

What we create lives not only across a sense of good and bad, but also across the spectrum of commercial viability. Because to think of our work as one dimensional (good or bad, commercially viable or not) is ignoring the deeper foundation of creating.

Do those exist who create simply in the vacuum of commercial viability? I bet there are. But odds are that’s not you. As a quick exercise to find out where you sit on this spectrum, pick all that are true for you:

1. I’d do anything to sell my work

2. I have a line I won’t cross to sell my work

3. I’m influenced by what is commercially viable

4. I make work whether I can sell it or not

If your only choice was number one or number four, you might not find this post all that helpful. If it was anything else, creativity operates on the aforementioned grid.

Time and commercial viability

Okay, so there’s a grid. What of it?

Two things:

• Every creative choice we make can be viewed with a great context (but that’s not license to over-analyze)

• The fourth dimension of time comes into play as we seek to marry what meets our sense of good as well as commercially viable

Meaning, it’s all about the relationships. Wrangling commercial viability comes at a cost. And that cost is variable and optional.

We can make something more commercially viable while making it worse in our own eyes. We can make something that’s better in our eyes but that is less commercially viable.

But regardless we make choices. Those choices can be large choosing what story to work on next, or small, like choosing to go up a fourth or a fifth note to complete a melody. And in a best case scenario, the “viability” of a work is met and we can call the sum of our choices worthwhile. At worst, we wreck our respect or motivation for the entire endeavor.

In other words, these choices inform our perception of whether time was well spent or wasted, and in the long-term, our floor or ceiling of what we’re capable of creating.

The case for uniqueness

The one thing that truly leaps off the grid of good/bad and commercially viable is uniqueness.

True uniqueness.

It’s a counterproductive notion, because the power brokers often defy it. They want what works. But what works can’t be manufactured.

A story about a supernatural place called the “Upside down” with the best that 80s soundtracks had to offer? You can’t manufacture that. A time-traveling soldier narrating us through his temporal crises as a result of his World War II psychological trauma. It doesn’t come out of the box.

What then, are the things required to make something unique. What are the ingredients?

Number one: Nobody would have made anything unique without being solely and gravitationally focused.

In other words, concentrated on one single thing. Not giving in to distraction and layering one action on top of another. All effort, little wasted. Nobody writes a line that echoes for decades or records a song that guts you emotionally while half-assing it. Say what you want about her, but Neve played the hell out of the role she was given. And if she were in any moment but the present, that just wouldn’t have been the case.

Second is leading with excitement, even when there’s fear (or especially when).

Imagine two circles (realms of possibility even). One is the most likely outcomes when we’re driven by excitement. When you approach ideas ready to run, ready to let them flourish. On the other side are the most likely outcomes when an idea is driven by fear. When we act on the impulse to not be bad (or worse). Which could also include being driven by comparison, where the more we don’t want to be something the more that we work it into existence. Which of those circles pushes your ideas to where you want them to be?

The third is full-on sprinting away from our self-protective instincts.

Maybe the only real sin in art is the sort of self-protection the kneecaps vulnerability. That tiny, quiet instinct that whispers “don’t make a fool of yourself” sands down edges. Every thing you’ve ever loved was made by someone who ignored that whisper. They looked stupid. Or too earnest or too intense or too into it. Trying to look “anything” operates on the same relativity where uniqueness suffocates.

Fourth is believing harder than the situation warrants.

Every act of creation is has, at its core, faith. Faith that you will (or even can) create something that you love even if it never loves you back. Which is doesn’t, because outside of self-esteem or confidence, how could it? Anybody can muster belief for a short period of time. But it takes a lot more than that to create something that lasts. It takes a well of worship, not just of an idea, but of what we’re capable of doing with it.

Lastly, seeing failure as fuel.

The odds that we’ll look back on every creative choice and call it a success or less than zero. Some things that start admirably will end up far less than, while some that look wild will be the strongest building blocks we could imagine. Why is this important? Because there is only one reliable pattern when it comes to creating:

We create → we judge → we evolve.

What that means for AI

And now, with AI layered into this equation, the ideas of creation (and uniqueness) might seem muddier. But the reality is, nothing in the grand scheme has changed:

• Our grid for good/bad and commercially viable

• Our time spent creating is still a factor in how well we can create

• Uniqueness is still a driving factor in commercial viability

Does that mean we shouldn’t find ways to use AI? No. But what is does mean is that we need to understand how the use AI impacts us.

The very nature of AI as we know it today is to connect rational and logical ideas. Two things that aren’t exactly the bed-fellows of uniqueness. And the further we let AI into the deepest levels of creation (character development, story design and lyric writing to name a few), the more we close the door on uniqueness.

And whether or not we admit, our use of AI can become a subconscious factor in our how we judge our work. As an author using it in ways that feel unnatural (or less human) is going to dampen the possibility of pride. And we can’t dampen pride without dampening meaning.

Similar can be said for our idea of what our craft actually is. If craft is emotional connection to a concept or work, replacing that with anything artificial will be an anchor upon how we rate it. And even when viewing craft as process, cheapening the process cheapens our perception of the byproduct (if not the byproduct as a whole).

And if artificiality isn’t a cheapening of the process, it’s hard to imagine what is.

Thanks for giving this one a read and until next time.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Work 1:1 with me and get a creative AI wingman. We’ll design prompts, optimize workflows, and map your projects so you create faster, finish more, and never lose your voice. Spaces are limited—so you get my full attention.

2. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

Other reads from AI Artistry

There’s nothing like being on the road to let you think about things that you can’t change immediately. I’d started on this idea of stupid mistakes a good while ago, and had taken a few iterations which still left it feeling short.

Ten days and some 1,500 kilometers later (usually miles, it’ll make sense in a second), I’ve gotten new perspective on my stupidest mistakes, and how I can be better at thinking about them in ways that make me better.

What changed as we drove across Prince Edward Island and the mid-to-western parts of Nova Scotia? A few things:

• I really thought about my stupidest mistakes, the lot of which are unique to me.

• I thought about how the stupidest creative mistakes are rarely small.

• I also thought of how every time I’d ever heard someone talk about creative mistakes, they were categorically small (too small to make an impact, e.g. ”turn off your phone when you write”).

It’s easy to dismiss mistakes as the tax we pay for learning how to make things, and in doing so, ignore their downstream signals. And yes, missteps are inevitable. But what constitutes stupid mistakes is unique to every artist. More importantly, it can be very hard to stay keenly in tune with them.

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Our stupidest creative mistakes are rarely small

Most missteps aren’t rational. They’re emotional. Fear of being exposed or labeled. Shame at being seen too early and written off for good. Pride in refusing to accept wrong turns. All things that, once flared, become misbeliefs and then ultimately logic I can use against myself.

That’s why “I’ll be smarter” doesn’t work. You won’t be smarter, you’ll just be equally human in the same conditions. These mistakes are not fixable-in-the-moment things. That’s why they cost the most. They are the learned behavior, chain of events, built-up misbeliefs type of things.

Let’s talk about what I’ve learned about my stupidest mistakes. I’d like to say there’s a “moment in time” aspect to this, but that wouldn’t be fair to the battle. They’re missteps that repeat themselves. Ones that needle me by the dozen.

If I were to put a name to the worst culprits, they’d have to be…

I release something that isn’t ready.

Like pitching a story that I knew was missing something irredeemable, all for the sake of “getting something out”. It’s a fine line, granted, but so is the line between time well-spent and time misused.

Why is this so tough? At first blush, it might seem like a fear of rejection. But rejection is worthwhile. Unless you’re pitching something expecting to be rejected. Which is a place I think most have been.

More importantly, it robs me of opportunities to hone what I believe is a creator’s most important muscle: vision. If I don’t force myself to have a vision, how can I know if something’s ready? If I don’t hold myself to being the most active participant in that vision, how can I claim more than a fledgling sense of pride?

I hold back something that is ready.

Like a song that’s been mixed and might only need the softest nudge to be released. But yet it sits. And I enjoy the hell out of it (which is great in its own right), but that enjoyment brings with it a half-life. The longer something sits ready, the longer it can be called unfinished and the longer it can be toyed with at the expense of something else.

And that expense is not just another song or album. It’s learning and growth and evolution and practice, and ultimately confidence.

Why do I do this? In many cases, it’s the chasing of perfection that holds us back (but something can be said for the vision piece as well). In others, it can be the act of promotion and namely, not feeling ready for it. In either case, it’s the acceptance of imperfection. That’s what makes this a bigger mistake.

I lose focus in the most meaningful moments.

This is both in the grand scheme of things and at the micro-level. For the former, imagine not recognizing the weight of a performance (or the weight of any performance). And as such, failing to practice, getting sloppy with logistics, or just setting yourself up for general anxiety instead of a joyous creative energy.

Or at the micro-level, letting the moment get too big simply by thinking about it. Like nailing the first half of a setlist only to get in my head and let up.

It’s one is my biggest, and potentially hardest, mistakes because it roots so deeply into the concept of mindfulness. Why my brain often feels like scattershot is both a question of nature and nurture, but by and large second-guessing is my nature and I’ve nurtured my own desire to chase squirrels.

The nature of these big mistakes is they are hard to fix, and maybe I’ll have to accept that I can never fully get past them. But what would be even worse is losing sight of them. Because these signposts give me the best possible understanding of where my creative journey leads.

The long-term value of sidestepping mistakes

It’s a simple concept: Stick with a doomed project for X amount of time, and that’s X amount of time not spent on something viable. It’s so simple, it’s dismissable.

So what could empirically happen if we cut down on our stupidest mistakes?

• If fear delays each release by six months, over 20 years I’ve effectively halved the number of things I could have finished and shipped.

• If I spend 100 extra hours polishing a project that only needed 20, that’s 80 hours lost. Do that twice a year for 10 years, and I’ve burned 1,600 hours—40 full-time work weeks.

• If I abandon four projects at the 50% mark every year, that’s the equivalent of two finished works never released. Over a decade, I’ve erased 20 projects from a legacy.

• If comparison keeps you from sharing even 25% of my work, that’s one in four potential opportunities—audiences, clients, fans—that never see me. Imagine the trajectory if they had.

Small missteps don’t feel catastrophic in the moment. But over a career, they compound.

Think of opportunity cost in decades, not days. In the big picture, they could double your career output.

The psychic savings is even deeper

The other side of the cost is the way unfinished work follows us. When we think about the cost of missteps, it’s often in ignorance of the quieter and heavier toll: being haunted by unfinished work.

Choosing not to release something spares the sting of judgment short term. But long term, it exacts a different price. An unfinished novel isn’t safely tucked away. It lingers, most often when you sit down to write something new. The song you never recorded threatens ‘REDRUM’ on every album you do. And then the ghosts accumulate.

And the paradox is that the very judgment you’re avoiding in the world gets replaced by constant judgment in your own head.

Releasing work, even imperfect work, lets it leave you. You can walk past it, learn from it, and move forward. But holding it back chains you indefinitely. One ghost lingers forever and the other figures out why it was trapped within that old washing machine and moves on.

At some point, the choice isn’t between “share it and risk failure” or “keep it safe.” The real choice is: do I want to be haunted by the specter of unfinished work, or do I want to live with the scars of work that’s seen?

The five archetypes of creative missteps

Over time, I’ve noticed my stupidest missteps tend to fall into a few archetypes. These archetypes offer a more personable framing that allows me to visualize the habits that go with it. And that sort of visualization offers not just a look at chaotic or problematic behaviors, but the ideal I’m striving for.

They are:

1. The Perfectionist (Overinvestment). Sanding the same board long after it’s smooth. Effort becomes a badge of honor, but the cost is diminishing returns. The Perfectionist cares deeply about craft—but struggles to recognize when enough is enough.

2. The Magpie (Shiny Object Detour). Irresistibly attracted to the new idea, they abandon the nest before the eggs hatch. Energy is endless, but commitment is scarce. The Magpie has boundless creative energy—but lacks containment to finish.

3. The Mirror-Gazer (Comparison Spiral). They can’t stop looking sideways. Every reflection of someone else’s work becomes a reason to doubt or imitate, instead of trusting their own compass. The Mirror-Gazer longs for meaningful impact—but gets lost in other people’s maps.

4. The Stubborn Mule (Pride Lock). Digging in feels noble. Double down when what’s needed is a pivot or a graceful exit. The Stubborn Mule has admirable resilience—but confuses persistence with progress.

5. The Ghost (Fear Freeze). When the finish line appears, I resort to endless tinkering. Choosing to be haunted by work than risk the judgment of it. The Ghost believes their work could matter deeply—but the weight of that belief becomes paralyzing.

Thinking in terms of archetypes allows me to decode the instincts that are tripping me up. Which, as is hopefully clear by now, is a collection intrinsically unique to the artist.

But that said, I don’t want a set of “common” mistakes every creative makes. I want a method to discover what my own stupid mistakes are, given my style, vision, and patterns.

A prompt for surfacing our stupidest mistakes

Here’s a framework for any author, musician, or storyteller who wants to spot their unique “stupid mistakes”. The output of this framework isn’t a generic list of “don’t do X.” It’s a list of the top three mistakes your prone to. It’s based around your vision, tendencies, and patterns.

Prompt: Find Your Stupidest Creative Mistakes

You are going to help me uncover the stupidest creative mistakes I make — the patterns, habits, and instincts that quietly handicap my growth, drain momentum, and chip away at my creative confidence.

Your job is not to list common creative pitfalls. I want to discover my own, based on how I think, work, and create. You are my reflective partner in decoding the instincts that trip me up.

As we go, guide me through each of the following stages with interactive questions and short reflections. Push me to give specific, honest answers — not surface-level ones. If I stay vague, ask for examples.

1. Define My North Star (Vision & Values)

A stupid mistake is only stupid in relation to what I’m aiming for.

Ask me:

* What kind of work do you most want to be known for in 10 years?
* What values do you refuse to compromise on?
* What would feel like “selling out” to you — even if it looked successful from the outside?

Once I answer, summarize the creative principles that guide me most. We’ll use these as the anchor for spotting mistakes that betray them.

2. Audit My Tendencies (Patterns & Pitfalls)

Mistakes leave fingerprints. Spotting patterns turns blind spots into known hazards.

Ask me:

* When you’ve stalled in the past, what behaviors or decisions put you there?
* What creative habits feel productive but secretly drain momentum?
* Which of your tendencies have you mistaken for “your process” when they’re actually avoidance?

After my answers, highlight any recurring motifs of self-sabotage or emotional triggers.

3. Identify My Blind Spots (Context & Constraints)

Stupid mistakes often come not from bad ideas, but from ignoring limits.

Ask me:

* Where do you chronically underestimate effort, overestimate payoff, or misjudge timing?
* What limitations do you pretend don’t exist (time, energy, skill, bandwidth)?
* Where do you push forward instead of pausing to refocus?

Summarize my blind spots — where idealism or impatience outpaces realism.

At the end of the exercise, summarize everything I’ve uncovered as a short, clear list:

1 Based on everything above, what are the top 3 stupid mistakes that uniquely belong to me? Phrase my final list as short, punchy mistakes (examples: “I say yes to projects that dilute my voice.”)
2. For each mistake, what’s the emotional driver underneath it (fear, pride, shame, boredom)?
3. For each mistake, what early warning signals could alert me I’m slipping back into this mistake?

Close with a short reflection on what these mistakes reveal about my deeper creative wiring.

Output

Tone & Behavior

Be conversational but incisive — like a trusted creative partner who won’t let me off easy. Don’t give advice too early. Ask probing questions, then reflect patterns back to me. Use my words whenever possible.

Stay focused on the emotional logic behind my habits, not surface productivity fixes.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Work 1:1 with me and get a creative AI wingman. We’ll design prompts, optimize workflows, and map your projects so you create faster, finish more, and never lose your voice. Spaces are limited—so you get my full attention.

2. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

Other reads from AI Artistry

Imagine a compass.

West is Me. East is Us. Our creative lenses are the terrain upon which we watch it drunkenly teeter and bounce.

Some days you trek hard west, fully in Me territory. Writing draft after draft, unapologetically selfish with your hours. Other days you swing east—saying yes to a friend’s gig even when you’d rather be home.

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Neither extreme is a win. And, since none of us can ask Salinger about, I feel confident in saying neither can last in perpetuity. But whether we trend towards (or prefer) creating solo or collaboratively, there’s always motion. And perhaps more importantly, subconscious choice.

These aren’t so much philosophical dilemmas so much as our existing patterns. But they add up, brick by brick, to a creative philosophy. Choices that form the sharpness, originality, and drive us to create in the first place.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.

Me versus Us: authenticity and creativity

The raw material of creativity always begins in Me. Every breakthrough starts in a cocoon, an internal place where we owe the world nothing.

For me, when I’m writing songs or hammering out a story, Me feels like the only sane choice. Shut the door, kill the noise, go deep. Creativity demands selfishness—or at least, my pattern says. But for someone else, the opposite can be true. The friction of collaboration, the spark of back and forth, the presence of a listener, these things can provide a sense of wholeness.

But what are the differences of Me versus Us, in a practical sense?

Me is solitude, selfishness, and singular focus. It’s the space where the spark first meets oxygen. And when we work solo, we get the best versions of:

• Vulnerability. In Me, you strip away the noise and hear what your raw voice actually sounds like.

• Edge. Me sharpens originality—the thing that makes your work feel alive instead of formulaic.

• Risk. Alone, you’re more likely to chase a weird angle, wander off-map, or deliver surprise.

Conversely, sanity lives in Us. Validation lives there too—though neither of those are exclusively a good thing. But at its best, Us will always trump Me in the realms of:

• Energy. Us is challenge and connection. And when an idea becomes a shared vision, that’s an energy that Me can’t match.

• Friction. Other people push back, question, and refine your ideas into something stronger.

• Meaning. Art doesn’t become unforgettable until it resonates with someone else. Us is where the work leaves your desk and enters the bloodstream.

The raw spark of Us will never reach the raw spark of Me. An edgy idea will all but certainly get rounded when it collides with Us. It’s the backdrop over which some of us try to stay locked in Me forever and others feel paralyzed unless they’re operating within the Us.

The real tension (read: creative blocks) comes when we resign ourselves to one or the other rather than learning when each one makes healthy sense for us. As a creator, it’s my job to recognize where I thrive and feed it appropriately.

The pressure to collaborate

Every time I watch an unforgettable show (right now it’s The Bear), I feel it. The pressure to collaborate. To say yes to or seek out the opportunities to brainstorm, jam, reciprocate.

But the majority of the time, it comes from the wrong place.

Fear that I can’t do it. A pressure to transactionalize my give with someone else’s take. A desire that’s nothing more than insecurity dressed up as noble logic. And the weight of it can flatten my work when I let it.

But the draw to work solo isn’t pure either. Yes, it can be about focus or discipline. But others it can be plain old avoidance of the mess and vulnerability that comes with letting others in. That draw can sharpen your edge—or leave you isolated with nothing but sharp edges.

Both sides carry risk. But both sides carry fuel. Figuring out which is which comes with being honest about the roots, which can be wholesome as much as unhealthy.

The two reasons we NEED Us

Let’s cut through the romance: most collaboration isn’t noble, it’s necessary. Strip it down and there are really only two reasons we actually need the Us.

Reason one: the workload is greater than the time.

Sometimes the task is just too big for one person. A novel, sure, you can wrestle that down alone. An album, likely true. But a TV season with ten episodes? No chance. Deadlines and scale will eat you alive. That’s when Us becomes survival—dividing the weight so it doesn’t crush you.

Reason two: the vision goes beyond your skills.

Other times, it’s not about hours, it’s about gaps. You can write the bass line but not play it. A director needs an actor, an actor typically needs another actor. There are just some works and mediums where alone we’re a fraction of a whole. A band isn’t just a preference—it’s physics.

Outside of those two? I urge anyone to think about the role of collaboration. Enriching and inspiring, sure, but not a strict necessary to create meaning, joy or beauty. And knowing this clearly matters. Because it allows us to ask: am I collaborating because I work best this way, or because I’m avoiding the hard, lonely work of Me?

The greatest reason to choose Us

Need is one thing. But the greatest reason to collaborate isn’t pressure, or validation, or even divide-and-conquer efficiency. It’s evolution.

When you work with someone else, we expand the map. Every collaborator carries different instincts, unique scars. And it’s fair to say that those imperfections can bring out versions of ourselves that might have otherwise stayed dormant.

But it’s a misconception to think collaboration accelerates our craft in ways solitude can’t. We don’t evolve the strictly because we create the bridge. It has to be the right bridge. That’s why the Beatles are the Beatles, The Sopranos is the The Sopranos.

All of which is to say, the multiplier effect of Us only happens if it makes us better for the next go-round.

Bringing the benefits of Us to Me (and vice-versa)

But given an understanding of what makes Me and Us great, we can open ourselves up to get the best of both worlds.

The gift of Me is that it resists that smoothing. Yet, when you let Us haunt the solitude, the echoes of challenge or a reader’s excitement can bend us for the better.

Try these moves to borrow from Us without inviting anyone into the room:

• “Yes, and…” yourself. Classic improv—but done alone. Take the weird idea you just wrote down, then respond to it as if a collaborator were saying “yes, and…” Push it one degree further, then another. This simulates the momentum of a brainstorm.

• Go further than feels natural. Have a chapter that’s hit a natural end point? Give it another two hundred words to see where it goes. And a second bridge or extend that final chorus. Suddenly, you’ve challenged what felt natural and created the opportunity for surprise (the currency of both delight and intrigue).

• Time travel: Imagine time-traveling into your past. Opening your laptop, guitar case, or notebook, and immerse yourself in past thoughts and conversations. Let that perspective, encouragement, and pushback free to skew the work at hand.

On the flip side, if you want Us to thrive, bring that unpolished spark into the circle. Try these moves to bring the rawness of Me to the perspective of Us:

• Bring the “first wrong draft.” Don’t show up only with polished ideas. Bring the one you scribbled at midnight. Lean in to what seems too strange or too sharp. The idea you’re most scared to say out loud is the one that gives the group its edge.

• Hold a risk auction. Everyone pitches one risky idea, something personal, weird, or half-baked. Then the team votes (not on the best idea, but on the most alive). The winner gets a round of serious exploration and keeps the nutrients of risk and originality circulating in the bloodstream of Us.

• Ask “What can only I see?” Before stepping into a room, answer that question in one sentence. Carry it like a talisman. Something that won’t dissolve, but that becomes your beacon within the collective.

These moves surprise because they blur the boundaries: you’re not choosing Me or Us, you’re letting them haunt each other. That’s where the creative electricity is.

Creativity thrives where we thrive

Creativity thrives in stillness—just as it thrives in collision. But it’s about where we thrive.

What feels sane isn’t universal—it’s personal. For some, solitude is oxygen. For others, it’s suffocation. And for most of us, the answer isn’t fixed—it shifts depending on the project, the season, even the day.

All we can do is stay aware of the momentum we’re building: the pull of Me sharpening your edge, the pull of Us widening your reach. And at all times, thinking of these choice for what they are: micro-decisions (not our identity).

Prompts to explore Me vs Us

If you want to use this rhythm instead of being ruled by it, start by asking yourself the right questions. These prompts are meant to help you notice your defaults, spot growth edges, and flip the process when needed.

Prompt: Identify where you thrive

When you begin a new project, do you instinctively close the door (Me) or invite someone in (Us)?

You are my interactive guide. Help me reflect on whether I thrive more in solo work (Me) or collaboration (Us) in my creative practice.

Please take me through this in steps:

1. Initial Instinct Check
   Ask: “When you begin a new project, do you instinctively close the door (Me) or invite someone in (Us)?”
   Encourage me to expand with a short reflection.

2. Recent Wins Review
   Ask: “Think about your last three creative wins—were they born in solitude or collaboration?”
   Help me map each win to either Me or Us.

3. Pattern Spotting
   Based on my answers, summarize whether there’s a leaning toward Me, toward Us, or a hybrid. Highlight any tensions (e.g., loving solitude but thriving in collaboration).

4. Strength Amplification
   Suggest how I can double down on where I thrive—either creating stronger boundaries for solo work, or building more intentional structures for collaboration.

5. Growth Edge
   Suggest 1–2 small experiments for leaning into the other side (e.g., if I thrive solo, test out a micro-collaboration; if I thrive in collaboration, try a solo sprint).

Output format:

* Your instinct: [summary]
* Your wins: [mapping of 3 wins to Me/Us]
* Your pattern: [analysis]
* Your strength amplification: [advice]
* Your growth edge: [experiments]

Prompt: Uncover areas for improvement and growth

Where in your process do you consistently stall—at the private draft stage, or at the public sharing stage?

You are my creative growth guide. Help me identify how I can improve and grow as a creator in relation to choosing when to work solo (Me) and when to collaborate (Us).

Take me through this reflection step by step:

1. Process Friction Check

Ask: “Where in your process do you consistently stall—at the private draft stage, or at the public sharing stage?”
Guide me to reflect on whether this stalling signals a need for more solitude, or for collaboration/feedback to move forward.

2. Feedback Resistance
Ask: “Whose feedback (or absence of it) do you resist most? What does that resistance reveal?”
Encourage me to name the people or groups whose voices I avoid, and what that suggests about trust, vulnerability, or independence.

3. Solo Strengths vs. Collaboration Catalysts
Based on my answers, help me map:

* What I gain from working alone.
* What I personally gain from collaborating.
* Where I may be under-utilizing one or the other.

4. Growth Prescription
Suggest 2–3 practical ways I can grow:

* One way to sharpen my solo practice.
* One way to invite collaboration in a healthier/more intentional way.
* One “stretch experiment” that pushes me into the less comfortable mode (if I lean solo, suggest a collaboration test; if I lean collaborative, suggest a solo test).

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Work 1:1 with me and get a creative AI wingman. We’ll design prompts, optimize workflows, and map your projects so you create faster, finish more, and never lose your voice. Spaces are limited—so you get my full attention.

2. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

Other reads from AI Artistry

Ideas, in my experience, can be impolite assholes. They knock on the door mid-shower. They scratch at my bed post at 2 a.m. when the brain should be off-duty.

And yet, everything humans have ever made started from one of these three capture moves. The Sistine Chapel was once a sketch. The phrase “I have a dream” was ink on paper. Every song you love (or hate) was mumbled into a recorder or scribbled in a notebook margin.

Or perhaps the Sistine Chapel was dictated, your favorite song was a crude drawing and MLK’s idealistic words were first captured onto a magnetic tape.

Therein lies the crux of this post.

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The triangle of capture

Every idea has three doors. In other words, there are only three ways through which we can trap an idea before it vanishes. You either:

• speak it

• write it

• draw it

That’s it.

It’s not a hierarchy so much as a triangle of capture. Each side of the triangle leans into a different instinct.

Speaking is impulsive and raw. You grab a voice memo, call yourself, mutter lines into your phone. It can be sloppy, but it preserves rhythm and tone.

Writing is deliberate but fast. A napkin, a sticky note, an app. Writing traps some initial bones so the idea can flesh out later, but at the same time can evolve an idea word by word.

Drawing is on the one side primal, and on the other the most thorough for capturing grand ideas. Arrows, boxes, and visual metaphors preserve shape and insinuate connection when words are clumsy, too slow, or too small.

The door matters

While the act of capture is what saves an idea from evaporation, the door we choose plays a big, and often unspoken, role in the way it grows.

Take, for example, that inimitable speech from August 28, 1963, but before it was its complete and generation-shaking diatribe. I’ll add that I don’t know the exact path it took to reach its final form, but let’s play with the possibilities.

The kernel of this idea: “I have a dream.”

If it began as spoken words: Imagine King pacing his study, speaking to himself, letting the phrases tumble unclean. Spoken capture gives rhythm before logic. The cadence comes first, and breath leads the thought. Even if the words weren’t exact, there was music to them, a heartbeat before it became a body. Speaking stretches ideas toward rhythm and resonance.

If it began as written notes: Now imagine it as ink on paper. Lines scratched, crossed out, reordered. Written capture forces clarity early. It builds bones before breath—edges, arguments, progression. The speech, in this path, would grow first as a skeleton of ideas to be fleshed out later. Writing stretches ideas toward order and argument.

If it began as sketches or diagrams: Picture arrows, circles, and boxes, a visual outline the status quo. Or instead of a diagram, a vision of the dream itself. Drawn capture gives shape and lets the idea occupy space as something we can point to or pull from. In this form, the speech could have existed as an architecture (in the case of a diagram) or a feeling (in the case of a drawing). Either is scaffolding to be built. Drawing stretches ideas toward relationship, whether logical or emotional.

None of these is inherently “better” than the others. But each gives any idea an early bias, stretching it in a different direction.

Most of us gravitate to one method

Almost everyone defaults to one (maybe two) capture methods. Writers write. Designers sketch. Podcasters talk. We stay where we’re comfortable. And for good reason. Comfort and speed are bed-fellows.

But that comfort can be restrictive in a couple of ways.

First, we force our idea down a known path. A path where we work faster, sure, but one where we often tread, our synapses often fire, and our wheels are more deeply tread.

Second, we deprive ourselves of a more well-rounded approach. Or if nothing else, practice. It makes us a little more brittle, more dependent on one channel (and the underlying skill that channel relies upon).

But what if, as someone who usually writes ideas, you try speaking them? You’ll notice the rhythm you’ve been missing. If you draw, you might start noticing shapes, connections, and patterns.

The unfamiliar mode doesn’t just grow our idea—it grows us. It makes us less brittle. It improves how we speak, improves how we draw, improves our hand writing.

It makes us more fluent in the raw language of creativity.

How AI extends the triangle

I’ve found the healthiest way to view the role of AI is this: reduce friction after capture so seeds become seedlings.

This takes multiple forms.

Capturing better

Many ideas die (or at least enter an indefinite state of cryogenics) in an inbox or an old notebook. And for the sake of time alone, they become hard to revisit.

Additionally, we can treat raw capture as a first draft of understanding, then run it through loops that makes it easier to use or digitize.

• Voice to skimmable transcript: Record freely, then auto-transcribe with timestamps and a 5-bullet summary. Ask for a highlight reel (“pull the 3 most original sentences and the unanswered questions I posed”).

• Sketch to labeled diagram: Snap your notebook page or whiteboard. Extract the text, label shapes (“box: problem, arrow: dependency”), and return a clean, vector-style version alongside an interpretation.

• Messy note to atomic notes: Paste a rambly paragraph and ask for “atomic notes”, one idea per line with suggested tags. Append a “continue here” prompt to make it easier to pick up the next action.

Imagine a world where you could adopt a “72-hour rule”: every capture becomes skimmable, searchable, and tagged within three days. What a way to prevent decay.

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Doing more with what we capture

Most people stop at “saving” when momentum comes from “reshaping.”

A captured idea is a seed. Growth comes from changing frames—audience, format, constraint—and from quick, low-stakes iteration.

Find small, repeatable transformations that explore the idea while respecting your voice.

• Progressive elaboration: Ask for a tight outline from your capture, then one level deeper (“expand section 2 into three beats with examples I could steal from my own work”).

• One seed, three outputs: For any capture, create multiple fast forms a 100-word paragraph, a 5-slide storyboard, and a 30-second voice script. Each surface reveals its own blind spots.

• Angle matrix: Test your idea across three lenses—who (audience), what (promise), how (tone). “Reframe this for a beginner/peer/executive,” “strengthen the promise without hype,” “try warm, dry, and bold tones.”

Feeling better about killing ideas

Letting go hurts, so we cling and clutter grows. A lot of ideas deserve mercy, and most “dead” ideas still contain living parts that we can salvage those.

AI can help by enabling rituals to extract value, save energy, and make killing ideas liberating.

• Stress-test the foundation: Drop a fresh idea into a prompt: “What’s the strongest version of this idea—and what’s its weakest?” If the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, you’ve learned something crucial.

• Audience check: Ask “Who would care about this idea, and why? Who definitely wouldn’t?” If the “wouldn’t” list is longe (or the audience feels misaligned) that’s a sign it may not be worth pursuing.

• Analyze the effort-to-payoff ratio: Use a blunt test like “On a scale of 1–10, how much effort would this take to execute well, and what’s the potential payoff?” If the gap between those numbers feels too wide, kill it before it drains energy.

• Idea autopsy: When an idea stalls, ask for a one-minute autopsy: “List what’s working (hooks, lines, insights), what’s weak, and three places these parts could be reused.” Save the parts as new ideas or ingest them into stronger ones. You can even ask for a one-sentence principle to reuse.

Killing ideas gets easier when you see them revived in new forms. Beyond that, AI can help us extend our time and reframe quitting as craft.

All of which is to say, the goal isn’t to replace the act of capturing our ideas, but to multiply the return on them. And for anyone with confidence in the strength (and dare I say goodness) of their ideas, that can feel rewarding, if not noble.

Until next time.

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

3. Book a training or workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

Other reads from AI Artistry

It wasn’t.

Rather, it was a negotiation, a minute-by-minute tug-of-war between confidence and doubt. I’d play a track back and feel like I’d cracked a code, only to move on to the next and wonder what right I ever thought I had to call myself a musician. Pride. Shame. Pride again. And so it goes.

But this is maybe the central throughline of the creative process. The war stories of “making it”, the finished product, they all have a middle. The chaotic, shapeless, slippery middle. Where the thing we’re making is no longer an idea, but not yet something you’re proud of. Ironically, the former on its own is something to be proud of.

The most disorienting part, and the one I’ve been mulling, is the speed of it all. And how it changes by the minute.

The quiet war under the work…

The pride–shame cycle is exhausting not just because of the emotional toll, but because it hides itself inside the work.

We don’t always see it as pride or shame. Sometimes it looks like doing thirty takes (a very bad habit). Or tweaking the mic settings hoping to skirt the blame. Or keeping something that should have scrapped entirely because you’re no longer sure you were ever right.

And in that tug-of-war, there are two versions of ourselves. And it becomes hard to tell which version of ourselves to believe. It feels like two diametrically opposed voices: an inner champion and the insecure critic. But it’s sides of the same self, speaking up from the same (deep) roots.

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Some want protection. Some are inspired. Some want to avoid embarrassment. Some are keen to rain it down upon you. It’s complicated because we’re complicated. Past experiences, subconscious standards, self-comparison—they’re all in the room, pressing their fingerprints against the same trackpad.

…and the truth inside shame

But inside the shame, there’s an opportunity for a shift: what if that shame is useful?

Not in the “you must suffer for art” way. But in the sense that shame—even misdirected—is tethered to our standards. Our very real belief that a thing could be better. Seeing potential can be painful. But that pain isn’t so much weakness as the price of having a vision.

The pain we feel in the creative process isn’t always a sign that something’s wrong. It’s just as much:

• evidence that we’re not numb

• a statement that we’re still in pursuit

• a reflection that we haven’t let go of the part of ourselves that believes

Which makes it a game of resilience. A game where the object is suffering pride and shame without stuffing them down, or running from them.

Moving goal posts indeed. But every time we push through, we create a memory that says: “This feeling isn’t the end. It’s just part of the path.”

The strange companionship of ideas

We treat ideas like they’re ours to command. Like tools or drafts or to-dos. But anyone who’s followed an idea long enough knows: they have a life of their own.

Some show up quietly. Others latch on. They haunt. They disrupt your sleep. They whisper when you’re trying to rest.

And still, we stay. Not out of obligation, but recognition.

At a certain point, the idea becomes something you’re in relationship with. Something to be in service to. It asks us to pay attention. To change. To grow into the person capable of carrying it forward.

That’s the strange companionship of creation. It doesn’t always show up cleanly. But when it won’t let you go, that’s a signal.

That’s the point

This isn’t about erasing shame. Or always choosing pride. And it’s absolutely not about tricking yourself into confidence.

It’s about staying in the room. It’s about fighting for your idea when you believe in it… and sometimes, letting it drag you forward when you don’t.

It’s about recognizing that the moment you feel the sharpest self-doubt is often the exact moment you’re standing on the threshold of something meaningful. That “I’m not ready” feeling? Sometimes it’s a compass pointing right where you should go.

It’s about fighting for your idea when you believe in it… and letting it pull you forward like a stubborn mule when you don’t.

It’s about momentum as a survival strategy. Not for winning. Not for glory. But for curiosity’s sake.

You don’t have to know where something is headed.

You just have to stay long enough to see what’s waiting on the other side.

Every cycle has an inherent metric

Every loop we run—whether creative, social interaction, or personal achievement—has a built-in measuring stick. And once you find it, you can wield it.

For the loop of pride and shame, the simplest and most telling metric is always going be the ratio: how many counts of shame versus how many points of pride.

When shame shows up more than pride, we slow down, avoid risks, and shrink the scope of our ambitions. When pride tips the scale, we lean forward, experiment more, and build momentum.

Something I’m trying: the next time I enter the studio or sit down to write, I’m going to keep a little post-it with two columns:

1. On the left: Pride

2. On the right: Shame

Each time I give myself a pat on the back or find myself jamming to a melody or laughing at a bit of my own prose, I’ll add a tick to the left column. Conversely, when I cringe, silently bemoan, negatively self-compare, or feel that urge to stop or quit, I’ll add one to the right.

Here’s the trick: the ratio itself is more important than the raw counts. If there’s shame 10 times but pride 30 times in the same period, that can still mean moving in a positive direction. Because it’s really about the direction the ratio moves over time.

The goal isn’t to erase our shame entirely. It’s to make sure pride is the dominant pulse. Therein lies the real opportunity of altering our pride-shame cycle.

AI prompts to take you in a new direction

What if the untapped skill isn’t keeping momentum—but restarting it?

Restarting momentum is not a flash of inspiration or a lightning bolt of clarity. It’s friction and grunt work: re-reading your messy draft, opening your half-finished project, making one tiny, embarrassingly small decision to break the guilt.

If momentum is the lifeblood of creative work, then learning to resuscitate it on command is the superpower.

There are some strong ways AI can help us fight this fight (practically).

AI can be a “momentum defibrillator” when we’re stalled in the pride-shame cycle. Think about it in terms of shortening the time between “stuck” and “moving again.”

Diagnose the stall point

This external lens catches the spots you’re avoiding.

I'm currently working on {TASK} and having trouble finishing it. Ask me three questions about this work-in-progress. Our goal is to answer the following question: Where did my energy drop off? 

Identify the types of moments that feel flat, repetitive, or avoidable.

TASK = "[e.g. draft, outline, song lyrics, design concept]"

Generate low-stakes next steps

These aren’t “finish the project” tasks. They’re bite-sized, momentum-friendly prompts.

My creative task is: {TASK}. Give me three micro-actions I can take right now to push this creative task forward, each requiring under 15 minutes.

TASK = "[Develop the bridge for my song, finish writing two chapters, etc.]"

Rekindle creative curiosity

Suddenly, the project becomes a playground again instead of a pass/fail test.

When shame is loud, curiosity is quiet. I'm trying to reframe a stuck moment that I'm in RIGHT NOW. 

Suggest five alternative angles I could explore from this exact point in my process, without scrapping what I have.

Build a “momentum library”

Next time you’re in the pride-shame cycle, you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from “here’s what’s worked for me in the past.”

I'm providing you a list of my own recurring breakthroughs, including:

* phrases and fragments
* design ideas and content wins
* problem-solving successes

First, analyze this list of events and find a throughline. How have I pulled myself out of stalls or lulls in creativity before?

-- List START --
[Copy/paste list of breakthroughs/events here]
-- List END --

Automate the warm-up

Think of it like a trainer putting weights in your hand—no decision-making, just action.

Create an AI-powered warm-up sequence. I want a 2-minute set of prompts, questions, or small tasks that you deliver to me for those moments when “I’m stuck.”

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

3. Book a training or workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

Other reads from AI Artistry

You learn faster. You get sharper. You discover what resonates and what doesn’t—not in theory, but in the open air.

But, at least for me, that knowledge has only ever been combated. Because where the responses are real, there’s also the inevitability of change and discomfort and imbalance, if only temporary. That’s why I started this newsletter: To create a space for something public. For honing insight-sharing and storytelling, and to help people like me who care about meaningful work and are looking for new ways to help them do it.

I’m more than fifty-two weeks in and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where this is going. And whether I’m doing it in a way that actually helps the people I care about reaching.

Because if I’m honest, the numbers aren’t moving. I’m not growing quickly. I’m not sure if the message is landing, hitting, or perhaps even too early.

And that’s okay. But if something isn’t working, I want to understand why. And in the same spirit in which I originally pushed myself to start this newsletter, I want to be brave enough to change direction when needed.

Some hypotheses

I’ve thought a lot about why this newsletter hasn’t taken off the way I hoped.

If I had to pick one single theory, it might be that of drift. I’ve drifted between storytelling and strategy, creative musings and technical scaffolding. People desire lanes. They want categories. The masses value direction, and at times I’ve resisted picking one. That’s the kind of writing I love to do, but it’s not always the kind of writing people know how to follow.

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I’m also of the belief that I haven’t shared enough of myself within my stories. I’ve tucked my overarching “why” into the corners too much. And also haven’t shed enough light on the struggles of my journey. That distance might have made the work cleaner, but it also made it harder to connect with, if not a little vapid. In a world full of noise, people cling to people. And withholding too much of what makes me a person might have made it harder to jump onto the path I’m forging.

But there’s something else I’ve felt at the edges: a quiet resistance. Among creative communities, there’s a mistrust of AI, maybe even a grief. Things are changing, quickly, and there’s a lot of noise out there pretending to be wisdom. In any hype cycle, hacks and gimmicks always take the lead. And those are the things that threaten to drain the magic from the creative process. And so, even when someone tries to talk earnestly about using new tools to make meaningful things, it can feel like walking into the arms of the thing we’re running from.

There’s no right answer for emerging tools and how they shape what it means to be creative today, just our own mental models and desires to create meaning.

But that’s exactly why I’m as bullish as ever. Because this is what I set out to do.

Giving more space

I’m not just a technologist or an engineer. I’m also an author. And that’s what I intend to make my center of gravity for now.

And in order to get my work the attention it deserves, I plan to funnel more of my time toward on the exposure of the writing I’ve been crafting for the last decade.

That means focusing more on events, interviews—anything that helps me on the journey of publishing. More of putting myself in the right position. Controlling what I can control. Sure, I’m a builder and I like doing the work more than I like selling it. But, lived over a long life, hiding behind the work is way worse than any rejection. And if I want to reach the people this work is for, I need to dedicate time to that next step. I have to put myself in the right position. I have to be willing to stretch further, to share, and to stumble out loud rather than tucked away.

So it’s time to ratchet the discomfort up a notch. The uncomfortable spots are the ones where you reach people.

That’s the only way this works.

The mission isn’t changing (much)

That said, the mission of AI Artistry isn’t changing much. If anything, it’s gotten clearer.

So, if you’re reading this—one of a small but loyal following—I want to first say thank you. I’m grateful to be writing for you. And I’m going to keep writing for anyone who wants to think deeply and make things that are beautiful.

So, here’s where I’m at.

• I’m going to start publishing less frequently—two posts a month instead of every week. Not because I’m giving up, but because I’m finally listening. I want this newsletter to be more than a drop in your inbox.

• I want it to be a toolbox. A set of weapons for creative people thinking deeply about technology and art, and how to make things that matter long after the ground stops shifting beneath our feet.

Which means reprioritizing a bit, as this newsletter is concerned. I want to spend more time on lasting tools that support the process of creation and less on one-off posts. Tools that help creatives think clearly, work better, and stay grounded in what they love.

The next chapter is about clarity and consistency, and spearheaded in the direction of authorship.

As always, I will be around to help thoughtful, creative people navigate without losing their voice. To hold space for the important questions while still moving forward.

And one more thing about direction…

All of this change comes on the heels of a classic creative conundrum: juggling two major side projects. For me, it’s authorship (namely a historical fiction novel) and a debut music album. The years (and I mean years) of juggling have led to making progress on both, but finishing neither.

The journey I took was at its heart, pros and cons, but it was more than that. It was rooted in emotional discovery and lightly understood motivation. Exploring those roots was key to me feeling like I came out with the right answer (and was the kind of interactive self-discovery AI can be brilliant for).

The process (kicked off with the prompt below) allowed me to lock. Choosing the better focus for me not just by asking the question, but by:

• Uncovering the "why" of each project. Namely, that the novel represented a clear path to a new career and a new identity, while the album was about "momentum for my music career," a vision that was still fuzzy.

• Pushing past the surface-level goals. This included challenging my own narratives around what they meant for me.

• Forcing the issue. Both with a ‘don’t take no’ line of questioning, as well as through pressure testing my initial decision (which was the album).

I was forced to admit that I’d regret not pushing the novel, that the album's monetization path was uncertain, and that I was ultimately prioritizing a personal feeling of accomplishment over a larger career shift.

The final choice: to focus 80% of my energy on the novel for the next 6-9 months—a strategic decision that honored long-term aspirations while also thinking through potential regret. The album isn’t abandoned; it was given a sustainable 20% focus, allowing it to slowly progress without compromising the bigger goal.

And with that, here’s a prompt for anyone trying to make the hard choice between two exciting creative endeavors:

I’m torn between multiple creative side projects — primarily writing fiction and making music. I often split my time, make progress on both, but finish neither. I need your help to:

* Explore the deeper purpose behind each creative pursuit
* Understand which aligns more strongly with my long-term goals
* Make peace with choosing one primary focus (for the next 6-9 months)
* Develop a short-term plan to finish something and use it as momentum
* Feel like I’m still honoring both parts of myself

Let’s do this interactively. I want you to ask me hard questions. Don’t let me off the hook with vague answers. If I try to say “both,” I want you to push me to pick one for now, based on purpose, potential impact, and momentum.

Start by asking me: • What are the 2–3 projects I’m actively juggling right now (titles or descriptions)? • What would finishing each one mean to me — emotionally and practically?

From there, guide me through trade-offs, goals, identity, and obstacles. Help me build a rationale for a decision I can commit to.

Ready when you are.

By identifying the root feelings and fears tied to each creative pursuit, I was able to come out with a decision that wasn't just logical on paper, but felt right at the gut level.

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Discover The Creative Compass: Your AI-powered guide for turning scattered ideas into finished creative work. No coaching calls, no spreadsheets, just a simple system that helps you find and focus on the projects that actually matter to you – without losing your voice.

2. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

3. Book a training or workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

Other reads from AI Artistry

It’s a sizable sinkhole for any singularly-focused creative brain. It goes exponential when we try our hand at multiple disciplines.

Key Takeaways

• Rigid, unchanging processes can lead creative purgatory (in ways that creative thinking with AI can help kickstart)

• Viewing a creative process as a series of internal handoffs lets us identify bottlenecks and improve transitions

• The value of AI comes in helping us to shape the work, while we maximize our creative powers on the edges

From there, it doesn’t take long to slide into process purgatory. Thinking there’s a one size or an all. Caught between wanting to do works justice and everything that keeps us from doing works justice. And all the while, crawling from one step in the process to the next, never thinking to restructure (or shrink) the almost-system that was supposed to help us complete stuff in the first place.

Why we get stuck in purgatory

It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a direction problem. You can’t improve a process that you don’t change. And an unchanging process is the definition of purgatory.

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And as rational as having an “unchanging process” feels, it’s also pretty irrational, when you think about it. At least in the creative realm where, at the very least, whatever comes out at the end is largely dependent on the time and space where we started it.

That’s the poison pill in structure. We all have a different threshold on “what’s enough” pain to justify change. And so purgatory continues—at least as long as the impulses in our head are faster than the ones hammering the keyboard or flicking the pen.

Which points us to two great areas where AI can be of service to the creative process.

For one, getting out of our loops. Whether that looks like constantly starting something new when something further along gets hard, or slightly melting down at the idea of choosing one thing where we dedicate our energy.

For a second, it’s keeping direction (if you’re not moving forward and all that). Having direction is a great way to keep from self-destructing, much less avoid purgatory. And sometimes directions need to be forced.

Capture the shape, leave the edges

You can’t talk about creativity and AI without acknowledging that it’s flat out tricky. The best worst-case scenario is it forces us to decide too early what a thing should be, when what you really need is room to figure out what our idea was in the first place. The worst worse-case is deprive ourselves any of the meaning of making something.

But this is the part most people get wrong. Thinking that process—a selected format, outline, or mental path in the dirt—is about teasing out the best in an idea. When it’s really about opening up the room, creating the space to let that idea take shape.

Anything we’ve ever put meaning to, we’ve put it to some thing that took some shape. Nascent or evolved, it had a shape because we attribute meaning to things (though it’s funny how often we forget about the indirect object). And whether literal or metaphorical, there’s a shape to all things.

When we understand how to shape an idea, to put pressure on it, that’s when we hit process. But capturing the shape of a thing (and encouraging it to be lopsided) is as right-brained as it is left. With enough time and balance, all ideas find their best form. They just need to breathe first. That’s where AI can really help.

But understand creativity lives on the edges.

Edges—structure, sequence, wording—these are the details. These are where humanness lives and creativity would go on infinitely if allowed. This is where the punchlines meet the setup and where the believability screams. It’s an immersion into story and surprise. Creativity lives on the edges, because we live on the edges.

These are the areas we absolutely, positively shouldn’t allow ourselves to give up.

Two prompts for injecting AI into a creative flow

Here’s how I look at AI as a way to invigorate our old creative processes, using none other than AI for self-reflection and an objective lens.

The thing you really need to do is pick your creative workflow. There are lots of ways to think of “a workflow” of course, but you could start with a basic list like the below or use your own.

Here’s a basic list of categories relevant for me:

• Songwriting

• Story writing

• Joke writing

• Course creation

• Content writing

• Video creation

• Album creation

• Course development

• Brand development

I keep mine overly broad (because it forces thinking into the broader picture, which is an approach I favor). But there’s a case for framing these as more targeted goals, like “landing a literary agent” or “promoting my latest song release”.

Either way, pick the one that you want to work on. We need it for our prompts.

Prompt 1: Visualize my workflow as a series of handoffs

Picture every step of your creative work is just a baton passed between versions of you. Ideator you hands the idea to writer you. Writer you passes it to editor you. And when either you drops it, maybe coach (or drill sergeant) helps us over the line.

Thinking in handoffs does two powerful things:

1. It separates roles, which creates effective moats in both time and space. You write. A future-you edits.

2. It defines progress. If a baton gets passed, there’s inherent movement. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t always our cleanest lap.

This lens serves to make things less dramatic. It’s easy to feel like we’re “failing to launch,” even though it’s really just floating high and low depending on the wind. So, we start by visualizing our creative process.

Here’s a prompt to visualize my creative workflow as a series of handoffs. For my example, I’m looking a workflow relevant to me: Music album creation. In other words, the development of an album (as opposed to the creation of the songs it’s made of).

I'm working on a creative project, and I want to visualize my workflow as a series of handoffs between different internal personas—like roles in a relay race.

The creative workflow I want to explore is:
[Insert creative process here—e.g., Album creation, Story writing, Video production, etc.]

Please help me:

1. Identify and name the key personas or "modes" of myself that show up during this process (e.g., Dreamer Me, Planner Me, Execution Me, Finisher Me).
2. Describe the strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of each persona.
3. Show me what baton gets passed from one to the next, step by step, in this creative workflow.
4. Suggest how I can improve the transitions between each of these roles (with practical advice).
5. Highlight where bottlenecks or stalls are most likely to occur—and how I might design around them.

At the end, give me a visual or bullet-style outline—my internal handoff structure—and offer any mindset tips or rituals that could help each persona succeed in their stage of the process.

Running the previous prompt to visualize my creative workflow (creating an album) returns two particularly helpful sections. One is improvements we can make to each handoff. The other is likely bottlenecks (which is really just its own set of improvements).

When we think about it as hand-offs, we can start to understand:

• Where we leave off using one brain (brainstormer) to another (producer)

• What the package looks each step of the way

• How to make those packages work better (“Producer Me” likes when I label files correctly)

Prompt 2: Identify the top places for AI

Now we have a granular list of every step of the process. And we also have a list of the places where we can improve that process.

That’s everything we need to condense down to the top places where we can get some AI boost in our creative process. AI can also help here, especially if we give it the hand-off improvements and bottlenecks lists from above.

Below is a prompt that we can use for this, which helps us by:

1. Looking at all of the tips suggested in these sections

2. Cross out any that wouldn’t be useful with AI

3. Circle any that you would do if you could

Looking at how to improve my handoffs and likely bottlenecks, let's filter out the places where AI can be the most helpful. Take all provided ideas and:

* Looking at all of the tips suggested in these sections
* Eliminate any that wouldn’t be useful with AI
* Eliminate any where we're forced to give up significant creative input
* Circle any where AI can help particularly well

-- ideas START --

[Copy sections like 
'Step 3: How to Improve Each Handoff'
Transition	Challenge	Tips to Smooth It

'Step 4: Likely Bottlenecks & How to Design Around Them'
]

-- ideas END --

If you circle three or more, there’s your answer.

(Optional) Further define your north stars

Lastly, we whittle down our top candidates to one or two.

Take one minute to work with AI to get a thoughtful opinion on the top and ask yourself one (or all) of these questions:

I'm providing you a list of the top places where AI can help me in my creative workflow. 

[paste list of top three places for AI - from Step #2]

I'm trying to decide which is going to make the most effective in my creative endeavors. Please review the list I've provided. For each option, I want you to answer me three questions. Afterwards, make a SINGLE recommendation of which place I should work on integrating AI.

Questions to answer:

1. “What does success look like if this works really well?” This is the question that keeps you from digging a rabbit hole instead of solving your real problem. 
2. “What’s the worst case if this breaks?” You’ll be amazed how clear your scope gets when you think about what you don’t want. 
3. “What is the bare minimum I need to be happy?”: Strip it down to the basics. If AI can do X (summarize, critique, organize, whatever), you’re golden. Everything else is just scope creep dressed up as “exploration.”

And there you have a best and worst case scenario for each idea, along with a top recommendation. Yeah, it’s ONLY a recommendation, but those can go a long way. These answers help analyze my north star, they don’t define my north star.

Also, nothing plays a stronger part in this decision than whether I’m trying to reduce pain, save time or get better output.

Make the machines come to you

This is where it can get weird and over-exasperating. We want to keep it simple, so bear in mind:

• Simplicity usually beats cleverness

• A lot of good starts with the unsexy

• We don’t want to be less creative

Your process should feel like a moving walkway at the airport. Just enough structure so that your next step feels obvious. At the end of the day, we’re always seeking to manufacture some momentum. If not for ourselves, than at least for our idea itself.

Use this prompt to take our north star and set ourselves up for the first step:

I'm providing you a north star for how I plan to use AI in my creative process. You're going to help me maximize my first step in implementing AI in.

My north star:

[Copy details about how I plan to use AI - from Step #3]

Start with three prompts that I can use to this end. Here's how to think about these prompts.

* Plant shortcuts where my future self will trip over them. Templates. Saved prompts. Half-finished drafts. Anything that whispers, “Just pick up where you left off.”
* Preload your environment with intention. Build default behaviors into your setup. If I always freeze at the blank page, start every session with a question like “What’s the point of this?” or “What’s the first terrible version of this idea?”
* Use the lazy route… on purpose. The fastest path is often the right one. Reuse. Remix. Reduce.

…And one survival tactic

Once you’ve named your north star, you need something even more boring: boundaries. Guardrails aren’t limits.

They are:

• Boxes that trigger us to move faster.

• Filters that extricate the bullshit.

• Hard lines that make the right things off-limits.

When we’re always on the verge of ‘AI drift’, sometimes a fence can be the best thing for us.

That’s something that frequently pops up in my work, and when it does it comes with an ever-present potential for aimlessness. But if we look at the forest through the trees of any creative endeavor (content writing, story writing, etc.), we give ourselves the space to define direction in ways that don’t box in our creativity.

It also means we can think more meaningfully about our creative process. Which we can use to maximize it when we explore more options, defend the right hypotheses and drop the wrong ones, and capture the shape while cultivating the edges.

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Grab my Prioritization Power Stack: Not ready for coaching or consulting? Check out the first in my library of plug-and-play prompt packs—a closed-loop productivity system that eliminates busywork.

3. Book a training or workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

Other reads from AI Artistry

The idea behind this post struck me hard and quick, but took a while to write (and by write I mean ponder). It was just that, though it was a list I really think said something, it was missing the kernel. The center of the oomph. And as The Kids Aren’t Alright played over and over in my head this morning, I think I found it.

It’s safe to say AI is hitting a level of ubiquity. You’ve heard a lot of “I use it for everything”, and you’ll probably hear more (that’s my recommendation at least, accounting for your own code of ethics, which I hope is obvious).

One of the optimistic angles underpinning “I use it for everything”, is this: Anyone who approaches AI with the right balance for their tastes is going to live better for it. I believe that, and even if I’m wrong, I think it’s the only worthwhile stance to take.

Whether you’re looking to gain time, money or a greater satiation of curiosity, it’s all relative. We’re entering the stage where the “should I” questions become the ones that hold us up. Because once we know we can do something, that’s always the next question.

This stage is where we find the real learning curve. Where we start to ascend beyond what other people can teach us and teach from within our own circumstance. Where our use of AI becomes less about what we do and more about where we are when we’re doing it.

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And if we could shed off our labels, we could find a whole new level of ways where AI can really bring us value. Likely a much more inclusive list than you might have thought.

AI is for you if…

It’s almost 0% about who we are. AI has infiltrated anything digital. It’s in operating systems and browsers and mobile apps. The blue sky is as blue for an administrative assistant as it is for a marketer or a bar owner or a professional photographer.

And yet sweeping statements about AI’s capabilities for roles or groups can serve to make us feel like we’ve fallen short (when we’re in those roles or groups). Without ever taking into account the theory or relativity. Because we’re always in a different place, and the place we’re in has a bearing on how AI helps us gain what we’re looking to gain.

If that’s the lens we look through, AI stands to help you if:

1. You feel like you work too much

When we feel like we work too much, it comes with a dissatisfaction for the job. And often when we’re dissatisfied with the job, it’s because we’re dissatisfied with the tasks. And no one says you need to offload the good parts of your job, if there are any. Just trying for the time-sucking (and potentially soul-sucking) parts goes a long way as a mantra.

2. You have more ideas than time

At any given point, I bounce between 3-4 things (I’m working on it). An open flood gate of ideas can be just as much a blessing as a curse. Not only does it shine a light on our limitations, but it adds another level of anxiety around untried (or unvetted) things—a whole lot of should to feel bad about.

AI can have a strong effect on our ability to go from idea to shipment. It can also help you to organize, prune, reposition, and delete.

3. You struggle to know where to start

For some of us, the starting line can feel like an upward climb.

And when we don’t start, we don’t build momentum. AI can be the scaffolding for a pressure-free first draft, a nudge toward structure. It helps reduce the emotional friction between the idea and the action.

4. You’ve hit a plateau in a specific area

Whether it’s professional or hobby, hard skill or soft, we’re bound to find ourselves in the rut. A place where we don’t know where to go next on the macro-level. Is it learning we need or practice? What’s the thing I need to go into the next direction.

AI helps us to gain awareness about where we want to go, and become a valuable partner as we stretch and reframe ourselves.

5. You secretly want a creative partner

You don’t need to create alone. But it’s always a juggling act to not ask too much of others.

But AI as a creative partner gives you at the very least, a sounding board. If you ask the right questions, it can spark ideas. And if you come at it from just the right angle, AI can even become a guide in being the best collaborator we can.

6. You obsess over the right words

I’m not saying this because AI can skip out the right words 100% of the time. I’m saying these for those who obsess over the right words 100% of the time. That’s 95% too much, and equates to a lot more brain power than we ever stop to think about. Something as simple as letting Gemini spit out the inane follow-up shows how AI can help us from obsessing where obsessing is detrimental.

7. You crave better boundaries with your own brain

The looming to-do list, the half-finished draft, the email we meant to write, thinking about the work is more tiring than getting through it half the time. The same goes for the drama, the blockage or the emotionally trying.

AI can help with the process of reclaiming mental space. We can say things that we’re afraid to say (use discretion), and when we do it can externalize the loop, give us the right amount of distance, and lay the foundation for us to create momentum.

Which means we’re always in a different place

One of the weird things that’s come with AI is the new light that’s been shined onto our strengths and limitations. We now have this gap between expectation and reality. And it’s only been insinuated, but we’ll be here for perpetuity—that’s just how wildly impactful and viable AI is as a technology.

But even in the face of that impact, it doesn’t change where we’re coming from. In both the physical and metaphysical sense, where we are is the most human thing we have.

As we navigate from any Point A to Point B (or even if we’re floating), we face one or several challenges:

• Implementation challenges: Struggling to make meaningful change and then have that change stick.

• Quality and authenticity concerns: Scrutinizing whether our goals and output are fake or misaligned to our voice.

• Creative roadblocks: Finding it hard to maintain originality, or even to strive for it.

• Mistrust in output: Anxious about inaccuracies, our responses and whether we’re even looking at the right things.

Which means our problems and frustrations are operating from a base of one (or multiple) of these areas. It’s a never-ending game, but it’s also perhaps the most important game for embracing the best sides of AI.

But that’s the spirit of creativity. And one that we can unleash to attack the way we operate and find something better.

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Grab my Prioritization Power Stack: Not ready for coaching or consulting? Check out the first in my library of plug-and-play prompt packs—a closed-loop productivity system that eliminates busywork.

3. Book a training or workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

Other reads from AI Artistry

With unintuitive processes and overwhelming applicant numbers, navigating the search for a new job has hit new levels of unpredictability. Speaking strictly from experience, there’s more activity for less reward and greater uncertainty for less stable opportunities.

With opportunities seemingly coming around less than we’re used to, how do we prepare for interviews when they arrive? And what role can AI play in helping us?

Key Takeaways

• Harnessing AI for interview prep means finding the right ways to build your confidence in two ways (research and role-playing)

• AI can be an impartial observer to help us identify patterns in our careers and construct a personal narrative that’s unique to us

• AI can not only help us research likely interview questions, but also coach us on how to answer them in ways that make us memorable

It’s all in the name of confidence

The job interview is never the job. It’s the sprint to the marathon. And one that can be gamed (though whether it should be, I leave to you). That doesn’t mean there are perfect answers, but there is a north star.

And that star is confidence.

Interviewing is a mental and emotional game. The place where it’s easiest to lose that game is coming across unsure, unauthentic, and unconfident.

Confidence doesn’t come from having all the right answers. It comes from:

1. Feeling steady in your own narrative.

2. Stories that make sense because they meant something.

3. Getting back up when you stumble.

Any interview prep that doesn’t move the confidence needle isn’t worth doing.

That’s not to say that confidence is the goal of prep—that would be getting the job. But in the inevitable cases of ticky-tack rejection, unclear feedback, or outright ghosting, it can be the only measure we’re left with.

If you can impress yourself, you’ve got a lot better chance of impressing a hiring manager.

Where interview prep meets AI

Building confidence is one thing AI is geared to help us through—if we’re smart about it.

Let’s take a step back and talk about what we know about AI:

1. It can help us do research that accounts for our existing knowledge level

2. It is an apt sounding board for self-evaluation and self-reflection

3. It helps us to look at problems (or scenarios) from different angles

Those are three things that, lego’d together in different ways, can do a hell of a lot for anyone who wants to walk into an interview with their head held. And walk out the same way.

We’re going to look at five unique uses for AI in interview prep below, which fall into two categories:

• Research: Understanding job-specific questions, company details, and culture, and uncovering what makes us unique to begin with.

• Role-playing: Analyzing our responses, refining our delivery, and figuring out what did and didn’t go well.

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Let’s move on to the five ways we can partner with AI to build ourselves into the best possible interviewee (and thus, best choice for the job).

Angle 1: Assessing our personal brand

We all have blindspots when it comes to our own expertise. We diminish what we’ve accomplished and carry failures as our own personal tornadoes. AI, then, gives us a neutral lens, one free of our own imposter syndrome or overcorrection.

Our personal brand, itself much bigger than a single interview, can be instilled into job and career-specific narratives. These narratives are the biggest way to make us memorable to an interviewer. It shows our patterns, values, and strengths in a unique way. And knowing exactly who we are is the holy grail of confidence.

Inputs can include:

• LinkedIn bios or resume bullets

• Past case studies

• Our personal mission and core values

Prompt 1: "Create My Personal Brand Throughline"

Use this to uncover the hidden patterns in your career that reveal who you really are.

I want you to act as a personal brand analyst. 

I’ll paste in details about me and my career (e.g. my LinkedIn bio, resume bullets, case studies). From that, identify a ‘throughline’ that shows how my values, patterns, and strengths connect across my work. 

Then write a short personal narrative I could use in interviews that makes me stand out. 

Bonus: give me one metaphor, image or analogy that helps bring this story to life.

-- About Me START --
[Copy/paste Inputs, e.g.:
LinkedIn bio
Resume bullets
1–2 short career stories or achievements]
-- About Me END --

Prompt 2: "Brand Mirror vs. Brand Blindspot"

Separate what you think you’re known for from what your record actually says.

Act as a brand strategist. I’m going to tell you what I think I’m known for professionally. Then I’ll paste my resume and LinkedIn bio. Compare the two and answer the following: 

1. Where is there alignment between the two?
2. Where are there brand blindspots? 

Tell me what I should emphasize more in interviews to reflect my strongest traits. And what’s not working or is missing from my materials.

-- What I'm known for START --
[1-paragraph answer to: “What do you think you’re known for professionally?”]
-- What I'm known for END --

-- About Me START --
[Copy/paste Inputs, e.g.:
LinkedIn bio
Resume bullets
1–2 short career stories or achievements]
-- About Me END --

Angle 2: Simulating success with interview question research

Understanding what an interviewer might ask isn’t about scripting ourselves. Rather, pre-empting their questions is a means of guarding against uncertainty (and uncertainty kills confidence). It can also be used to strategically:

• Helps us layer in our personal narrative in the most natural ways

• Contextualize what a great answer looks like compared to a bad (or simply good) one

Inputs:

• Job description

• Company blog posts

• Role-specific research

Prompt 1: “Design My Interview Question Map”

Use this to reverse-engineer the interviewer’s likely line of questioning.

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Me neither.

It’s hard to fathom after the age of social media and all the revolutions of the SaaS economy, but we did it. AI has helped us all expand our digital footprints faster than we ever have. I’m talking of course, about the world of new URLs and shareable links and digital breadcrumbs that come with using AI tools.

Anyone making a hard effort to adopt AI is probably running into some early version of insanity in their adoption journey. Which makes it no better time to pause and reflect.

Key Takeaways

• Navigating the growing chaos of AI interactions requires intention—like established pathways and decision trees

• Differentiating between tasks and long-term AI assistants enhance efficiency and creativity in your workflow

• Save the URLs of your favorite ChatGPT threads, Claude Chats, etc. — embracing lightweight, old-school concepts like bookmarking can make it easier

With AI, we find ourselves entangled in a web of interactions, new patterns (or more often the void of them) and an unrealized complexity to our digital existence. As we charge towards more autonomy and better use of commercial AI tools, the need for self-structure gets more vital.

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But how do we manage our fast-growing digital footprint practically?

The simplicity we didn’t know we were missing

In the olden days, I might work with a Trello account having tens of things relevant to me or a JIRA account with closer to a thousand. Not to mention emails or saved social posts or event agendas or code repos. A lot, but you get used to it.

And then there’s now. Here are the AI tools I use regularly to build faster, think deeper, and keep my creative work flowing:

• ChatGPT: My go-to assistant for writing, brainstorming, research, and building prompt workflows.

• Claude: Especially useful for code generation and data analysis, working through complex learning tasks, or reformatting messy inputs into structure.

• Gemini: I use both the chat interface and in-app integrations for lightweight writing support, as well as for image creation.

• Perplexity: My first stop for research-heavy questions (particularly less technical “Search” style questions). Combines the speed of a chatbot with the source depth of search.

• Manus: I use this as a deep research partner.

• NotebookLM: My main learning tool, which helps me to ingest docs of tools, conduct market research (given my hand-selected sources) and interact with dense reading.

• Hunch.tools: I use this to create lightweight AI prompt chains around content writing and creation. Example: Taking a LinkedIn post and crafting eight different post types with it.

If I’m an undiscerning or chaotic user of ChatGPT, I could create five threads a day. That’s almost 2,000 a year if I work every day. Or get curious, or want to learn something or have a TV that I’m trying to mount.

The most important lesson: Save your URLs

No one ever says anything about this part.

Your wake-up call falls somewhere between your 17th ChatGPT thread, your third Claude conversation about pricing strategy, and that haunting feeling that you once solved this exact problem.

You can’t find that old but informative thread where you:

• Sent that random 2am message to Claude with the seeds of your next product

• Generated a Gemini sketch that captured your new aesthetic before it was your new aesthetic

• Perfectly tuned ChatGPT to get through your creative block

From here until forever, I’m going to assume you know it’s important to save links—like ChatGPT threads, Claude chats, and Perplexity searches all allow. Without a saved link, some of our most fruitful partnerships might vanish. Archived or so hard to search for they eventually go the way of the Ring (into lore).

How to organize the chaos

To create momentum (instead of confusion), I’ve found it helpful to impose just enough structure to stay grounded. Here’s how I do it:

Categorizing my task: Am I generating, researching, summarizing or assimilating?

One extra lens I’ve found invaluable: classifying what type of work I’m actually doing. Knowing what task you're doing—and naming it—can turn a fuzzy question into a focused discussion.

Most sessions fall into one of four categories:

• Generating → You're making something from scratch: an outline, a subject line, a melody, a draft.

• Researching → You’re asking questions and collecting facts, insights, or references.

• Summarizing → You’re distilling longform content (notes, transcripts, research dumps) into usable material.

• Assimilating → You’re combining and structuring ideas across formats—building systems, writing playbooks, connecting dots.

This simple lens can help set the tone of your prompt and the shape of the response. I wrote more about this framework in The four buckets of practical AI, if you want a deeper dive.

Categorizing my sessions: Tasks vs. assistants

Once you’ve applied the tree above a few times, you’ll naturally start to classify your sessions as either one-time tasks or evolving assistants.

This mental model changes everything. It helps you set expectations—for both yourself and the tool—and reduces the likelihood of spiraling into rabbit holes when you only needed a quick answer.

Here’s a friendly matrix that compares Task Mode and Assistant Mode side by side:

Define your destination before you take the first step

Whenever I open a new chat window, I ask myself: What’s the job to be done here? Without that clarity, it’s too easy to chase tangents. A simple, self-defined decision tree can act like guardrails and limit the sprawl.

Decision Tree: What kind of help do I actually need?

1. Do I already know what I want to make or learn?

   1. Yes → Go to Task Mode

   2. No → Go to Assistant Mode

Embrace lightweight tools

We’re overloaded with new tools and clever features, but one of the most powerful tricks I use is deeply analog: bookmarking.

I have a bookmarks folder in Chrome where I keep track of some of my most used threads grouped by tool. It’s my reference library, and one that saves me a lot of extra clicks. I don’t save everything, but the ones that tend to get favorited either are teaching me something, saved me time repeatedly, or are part of a larger project.

You could even take it a step further and tag them by purpose (e.g. Marketing Copy, Client Prep, Prompt Experiments). In the age of AI, clarity is an underrated productivity multiplier.

Designing our thoughtful approach to AI

As we navigate this ever-expanding digital landscape, striking a balance between autonomy and structure is key.

Before summoning AI for assistance, I consistently ask myself: “What am I trying to achieve?” As a practice, this helps reduce a small spark of anxiety. Framing whether your inquiry is seeking efficiency or inviting nuance ensures more confident AI interactions.

So to circle back, try to make habits of:

1. Consistently questioning why we’re doing something

2. Clearly defining our paths

3. Distinguishing between tasks and assistants

4. Finding small and lightweight ways to stay organized

And here’s a challenge: Before your next AI engagement, take 30 seconds to think about your goal.

Other reads from AI Artistry

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Grab my Prioritization Power Stack: Not ready for coaching or consulting? Check out the first in my library of plug-and-play prompt packs—a closed-loop productivity system that eliminates busywork.

3. Book a team training or executive workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

This post is music-centric, and all about the different capabilities that go into making music. It’s part of something bigger I’m working on called my “AI Map for Music Makers”. I’m pulling from ten thousand hours and hundreds of songs to think deeply about where AI lives in music, and mapping it all out for the good our processes and our sanity.

Sign up to join the waitlist the AI Map for Music Makers

As a musician, you can live under a rock, hiding from ChatGPT and all its sharp-toothed little brothers and sisters. You might know absolutely NOTHING about AI. And it could be because you don’t want or don’t care, But even if you do, you still know one thing:

The line that technology (and by extension, AI) will never cross.

It’s different for everyone and only commercially debatable. I’m sure if you have them, I’d love them.

But what does that actually mean in practice? Well it depends on a few things, including:

• The parts of the music making process

• How we view the creativity of any given capability

• How we value the authenticity of any given capability

That’s a lot, but in this post, we’re just aiming to lay the foundation. Let’s start with how we think about all of the capabilities involved in creating music.

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At its core, these are the capabilities of making music (within which we can find little spots for using AI). Whether we’re comfortable using AI in those spots is a personal decision.

These fall into seven categories.

The 7 categories for AI use

We’re looking at all aspects of making music. Everything from:

1. Idea capture and transformation: How musicians record, transcribe, or convert raw musical ideas into structured, usable digital formats(quickly or otherwise). Anything from voice memos to transcribing a hum.

2. Lyric and concept development: Crafting, refining, and enhancing lyrics, everything from poetic devices to song concepts, tone, and wordplay.

3. Melody and musical idea generation: Developing or suggesting melodies, chord progressions, motifs, and musical structures. Giving sketches a more complete musical identity.

4. Song development and structure: Arranging and even critiquing songs, optimizing structure and flow.

5. Instrumentation and rhythm support: Creating, humanizing, or enhancing instrumental parts, rhythms, and layers—laying the musical foundation.

6. Vocal shaping and performance: Modifying or enhancing vocal performances, supporting both technical correction and creative vocal exploration.

7. Audio engineering and finishing: Ensuring professional quality and polish. In console things like mixing, mastering, cleaning, restoring, and spatializing audio.

You’ll notice this categorization comes in a loosely chronological order. Put ‘em together and it looks like:

Idea capture -> Lyric and concept development -> Melody and musical idea generation -> Song development and structure -> Instrumentation and rhythm support -> Vocal shaping and performance -> Audio engineering and finishing

Sure, if you put five musicians into a room, four of them would fight me verbally for that assertion, but isn’t that what makes music great?

More importantly, we can break these categories further into the core set of capabilities. In other words, the clear actions we take because they’re within the music-making process.

The big list of capabilities (by category)

First, here’s an exhaustive list of all of the capabilities—from capturing early ideas to final audio polish. Each is also defined.

• 🪶 Idea Capture and Transformation

  • Voice memo transcription to tagging: Turns voice recordings into text and labels them by mood, tempo, or key for easier organization.

  • Humming to MIDI conversion: Converts a hummed melody into MIDI notes that can be used for arranging or producing.

  • Idea to instrument matching: Suggests instruments or sounds that complement a rough sketch or initial idea.

  • Tempo mapping for live recordings: Creates a tempo grid based on a freeform or live performance to make it easier to build around.

  • Genre to style classification: Identifies the genre or musical style of a track to guide creative direction.

• ✍️ Lyric and Concept Development

  • Lyric suggestion to rhyme assistance: Provides line ideas, rhymes, and phrasing that fit your song’s tone and message.

  • Lyric sentiment alignment: Checks whether lyrics match the emotional intent of the song and suggests refinements.

  • Metaphor and imagery generation: Offers poetic language, visual metaphors, and evocative phrases to enhance lyrical depth.

  • Title and hook generation: Creates catchy song titles or chorus lines to make a track more memorable.

• 🎼 Melody and Musical Idea Generation

  • Melody generation from scratch: Creates original melodic phrases based on mood, genre, or thematic cues.

  • Chord progression suggestions: Recommends chord patterns that support the melody and emotional feel of the song.

  • Style or genre mimicry composition: Writes music in the style of a specific genre, artist, or time period.

  • Countermelody and motif generation: Adds secondary melodic lines or motifs to support and enrich the main theme.

  • Key or tempo experimentation: Suggests alternate keys, time signatures, or tempos to explore different emotional effects.

• 🧠 Song Development and Structure

  • Song structure optimization: Refines the arrangement of sections (verse, chorus, bridge) to improve flow and engagement.

  • Arrangement suggestions: Advises on which instruments and layers to introduce or remove at different points in the track.

  • Arrangement simplification for performance: Reduces complex arrangements into playable versions suited for smaller setups or live use.

  • Complete song generation: Creates full-length songs including lyrics, melody, chords, and arrangement.

  • Automated song critique or feedback: Evaluates a song’s structure, balance, or emotional impact and provides improvement ideas.

• 🥁 Instrumentation and Rhythm Support

  • Drummer or backing tracks: Generates drum grooves or complete rhythm sections that match the mood and tempo of a song.

  • MIDI humanization: Adds natural timing and velocity variations to MIDI sequences for a more human feel.

  • Loop or sample generation: Produces original musical loops or one-shots for use in beatmaking or production.

  • Instrument synthesis and design: Builds new instrument sounds or tweaks existing ones for use in recordings or live sets.

  • Stem separation or isolation: Splits finished songs into individual parts like vocals, drums, or bass for remixing or analysis.

• 🎤 Vocal Shaping and Performance

  • Pitch correction or Auto-Tune: Fixes off-pitch notes in a vocal track while retaining style and character.

  • Vocal harmony generation: Creates harmonies that follow a lead vocal’s melody and key.

  • Voice synthesis or cloning: Generates vocal performances that replicate or reinterpret an existing voice.

  • Language translation singing: Renders a sung vocal in another language while keeping melody and phrasing intact.

  • Real-time performance effects: Applies effects like reverb, delay, or filtering during recording or performance.

  • Emotional expression modeling: Shapes the tone or delivery of vocals or instruments to convey specific emotions.

• 🎚️ Audio Engineering and Finishing

  • Automatic mixing or EQ: Balances levels, stereo placement, and tone across multiple tracks for a clear and cohesive mix.

  • Mastering assistance: Applies finishing touches to make a song loud, polished, and ready for release.

  • Noise reduction or cleanup: Removes background noise, hums, or clicks from recorded audio.

  • Audio restoration: Improves clarity and fixes problems in degraded or poor-quality audio files.

  • Dynamic range optimization: Smooths volume levels across a track to maintain clarity and emotional impact.

  • Spatial audio processing: Places sounds in a stereo or 3D environment to enhance depth and immersion.

How does this help us?

When we know everything that goes into the process, it helps us to identify where AI might work for us. But foundationally, it lets us do hell of a lot more than that. That includes self-evaluating the creativity and authenticity of a specific part of the process to identifying how to use AI when deemed appropriate.

Looking at everything through two lenses

Two key emotional factors really dictate our creative engines. They evolve over time but always dictate the creative choices we make versus the ones we skim past. They are: creativity (“Is this about the big blue?”) and authenticity (“How much does this feel?”).

But when it comes to the honest process of music making (ie capabilities), it’s more like:

• Creativity: How much room do I have to get wild?

• Authenticity: How deeply does it impact authenticity?

High creativity tasks generate new material: writing melodies, exploring harmonies, or experimenting with genre blends. Low creativity tasks are supportive, like reducing noise or cleaning audio.

Meanwhile, high authenticity refers to the emotional realness. Almost every capability opens the door for us to be authentic. Some, like the nuance of a vocal, just open the door much wider.

How can we think about the authenticity and creativeness within the realm of making music? Use this as your mental matrix:

But beyond understanding the creativity/authenticity, we empower ourselves to make our process better. That’s because…

For any single capability, we can ask ourselves

Like a flashlight pointed at your own creative process, these three questions help you make smart choices about how you work, why you work, and where technology has a seat. You know, all of the things that you want to live and breathe within your music.

Question 1: How am I doing this capability right now?

This question grounds you in your current habits. You can’t optimize or change what you haven’t noticed, and I’m guessing a lot of music don’t think about their process in such a level of detail. But why not start, right?

Take vocal harmony generation as an example. Maybe you’re fumbling through multiple takes to stack harmonies by ear. Or maybe you’re not doing them at all because you don’t know where to start. Asking the question, you recognize that knowledge (or lack thereof) and set a direction.

Question 2: Would I use AI for this part of the process?

This is your filter for identifying your own personal creative boundaries. AI might be available, but does that mean you want to use it? Your answer here helps preserve your voice and intention.

You might say no to melody generation because that’s how you express emotion and you want those to come from you. But noise reduction might just be a time-eating part of the process for you. You’re defining where AI or automation actively serves your process versus hurting it.

Question 3: (If I would use AI for this) what tools or plugins let me do this?

This is the bridge between reflection and betterment. If something’s worth automating or enhancing, you can look for how to do said capability.

Maybe you’ve realized you’re open to help with vocal harmony generation. Now you're Googling “iZotope Nectar”, “Waves Harmony”, or exploring tools in your DAW that you’ve ignored. You're turning awareness into momentum and installing a better process.

Bringing it all together

Let’s go back to our list of capabilities, looking at them through the lens of creativity and authenticity.

The best places for AI in music

Even in music, some tasks are just... tasks. Utility tasks that are repetitive or grunt worky. These rank low in both creativity and authenticity, which is exactly why they’re perfect places to look at using AI. Here are the top five:

1. Noise reduction or cleanup: Cleaning up hiss, hum, or background chatter isn’t an artistic decision — it’s maintenance. Let the machines handle it.

2. Tempo mapping for live recordings: Lining up a performance with a grid, both tedious and error-prone. Now it's fast and mostly invisible — just how we like it.

3. Audio restoration: Fixing crackles, pops, and damaged recordings is no one's dream gig. But it’s a dream use case for AI

4. Mastering assistance: This one’s controversial, but AI can now get your tracks 80% of the way to "release-ready." Perfect for demos or non-perfectionists.

5. Dynamic range optimization: Balancing the loud and soft parts of a mix used to require finesse. Now it’s a preset. Let it ride.

We can’t compromise authenticity when decisions are objective, the variables are measurable, and there's little room for personal taste.

The worst places for AI in music

The following capabilities score high in both creativity and authenticity, which you might call something of red zone. They’re where AI scrapes away at the very thing that defines us as artists.

1. Lyric suggestion to rhyme assistance: It’s tempting to outsource your pen, but if every song leans on the same trained rhyming engine, we lose the voice behind the words.

2. Melody generation from scratch: Melody is emotion in motion. When the machine does it, you’re often left with something catchy but soulless.

3. Lyric sentiment alignment: It might tell you your words don’t match the mood — but sometimes dissonance is the whole point. Don’t smooth over the rough edges that make a song real.

4. Complete song generation: Sure, it’s fascinating. But who are you in that track? If you didn’t write, sing, or even guide the vibe, is it still yours?

5. Song structure optimization: Formulas can’t feel. Just because a chorus hits at the "optimal" timestamp doesn’t mean it lands in the heart.

Anything that gets in the way of your voice (discovered or still discovering). What are the things we discover through the course of the song? Story. Emotion. Rhythm. Flow. Feel.

All areas where we stand to lose the most by bringing in AI.

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Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Grab my Prioritization Power Stack: Not ready for coaching or consulting? Check out the first in my library of plug-and-play prompt packs—a closed-loop productivity system that eliminates busywork.

3. Book a team training or executive workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

A lot of traditional creativity advice zeroes in on what you make, while glossing over a critical area: where ideas actually spring from.

Understanding the origin of an idea shapes how we develop our projects, how we communicate our narratives, and ultimately, how authentic and original our work becomes.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into the two primary paths for new ideas—inside out and outside in. Each offers unique advantages and challenges, depending on the reasons we’re enlisting our creativity in the first place.

Key Takeaways

• There are two paths to creative ideas, each offering benefits and drawbacks, and understanding the origin of an idea allows for more intentional crafting

• “Inside out" ideas emerge from and are built upon personal experiences or collected knowledge

• "Outside in" creativity draws inspiration from the external, often repurposing or recycling what works, but in new ways

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Identifying the source of your ideas early can help us better nurture those ideas, and breathe life into into them in a way to speaks from our core values.

Let’s explore these two creative paths.

Inside out creativity: When your ideas come from within

Some of the most resonant creative work starts from gut feelings, core truths, or asynchronous revelations. Inside out creativity is the path of drawing from your base. That base can be past experience, emotional memory, personal beliefs, or collected knowledge.

Examples of inside out creativity look like:

• A founder building a tool from pain points they’ve had for years

• A songwriter pulling lyrics from the breakup they never wrote about

• A designer reimagining a product based on known behaviors or audience triggers

• A novelist drawing on the unspoken dynamics of their childhood

These ideas don’t just come from curiosity—they bubble up out of lived knowledge. That’s often what makes them so sticky.

Why choose the inside out path?

• Authenticity hits more heavily. People can feel when it’s real.

• It’s more sustainable. You’re pulling from a deep well, not chasing trends.

• You’ll create things with soul. And soul tends to travel.

When to be careful

Inside out doesn’t mean ignore the world. And one of the risks is that it might trap us in our own assumptions if we:

• Miss broader relevance from untested (or lightly tested) ideas.

• Mistake short-term catharsis for long-term value.

• Conflate personal importance with audience resonance.

When it works best

Use inside out creativity when:

• You’re writing something personal (essay, memoir, novel)

• You’re creating a product for people like you

• You’re defining a brand or voice

• Authenticity is of the utmost importance

It’s not only a way to find your voice—it’s the only way to make something only you can make.

Outside in creativity: When your ideas start with the world

Not all great ideas come from quiet reflection—some begin in the noise. Outside in creativity is driven by stimulus: the article, the viral outburst, the time-tested structure. At it’s core, it’s the sincerest form of flattery.

Examples of outside in creativity look like:

• A designer creating a concept after seeing a museum exhibit

• A marketer reworking website messaging that a competitor has nailed

• A writer reshaping their novel pitch after reading another’s success story

• A songwriter structuring a musical arrangement after a song they admire

• A founder adapting their pitch deck to mirror the narrative structure used by a winning YC team

These aren’t copied ideas; they’re re-spun. Something else (maybe something successful) grabs us, and we refine it with our lens.

Why choose the outside in path?

• You generate faster. Having an idea of what we’re going for gets us there faster.

• You give your audience what they expect. There are types of content where defying expectation works against you.

• You can crowd-source what works. We work from previously tested ideas or structure.

When to be careful

But just like the alternative, external inspiration has its traps:

• Mimicking others is the quickest path to losing your voice.

• Repurposing what works has a shelf life.

• There’s a greater risk of being seen as unoriginal (or a copycat)

When it works best

Use outside in creativity when:

• You’ve seen first-hand what resonates with a specific audience

• You’re in try-it mode and want to find new things that work

• There’s a ‘table stakes’ aspect to the content you’re creating

In short, outside in works when you know the WHY, but you’re playing with the what and the how.

Why this matters in the age of AI

In the past, your creative raw material had some natural friction. It came from long walks, life experience, conversations. You lived something before you could turn it into something.

Now? The inputs are infinite. Models, in some ways, have inspiration, mimicked voices, and common structure baked in. Which means the stakes for originality are quietly rising.

Here’s what’s on the line:

• Creative Integrity: If you're not careful, you start sounding like a combination of inputs, rather than someone with a point of view. There's a difference between influence and inheritance.

• Ethical Authorship: The more we build on someone else’s work, the greater the scrutiny (both internal and external).

• Signal vs. Noise: The world needs more ideas that feel made, not recycled. The origin of an idea has a strong connection to how authentic it reads.

So how do we choose the right path?

It helps to remember that this is a spectrum. Many an idea percolates and is formed when we apply a little of both. But deciding the path to take for any given creative idea is a factor of two things:

1. Where we’re at in the moment (creatively stalled or flush)

2. The place and purpose for our output

Here are little bit of a decision guide you can consider when choosing whether outside in or inside out will work better for a given idea.

There’s no mistaking it, blending both paths is an art. Great creations harmonize the rich inner world with the colorful outside one. But recognizing where ideas come from goes a long way in striking the balance between authentic and effective.

How I can help

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Level up with 1:1 coaching: Get tailored support in prompt design, creative workflows, or AI strategy. Whether you're a writer, leader, or product thinker, I’ll help you use AI to create faster and smarter—without losing your voice.

2. Book a team training or executive workshop: From half-day bootcamps to role-specific trainings, I help teams unlock practical use cases, establish smart guardrails, and build momentum with clear, no-jargon frameworks.

3. Grab my Prioritization Power Stack: Not ready for coaching or consulting? Check out the first in my library of plug-and-play prompt packs—a closed-loop productivity system that eliminates busywork.

One of the best ways through this is getting feedback. In other words, getting a sneak peek into what someone might say (or do) when asked a given question or in a specific circumstance. The response to which builds our confidence and adds a few degrees to the never-complete 360-degree understanding of a person or segment.

Key Takeaways

• Digital twins provide a fast, low-cost way to simulate feedback and reactions from personas, people or characters

• Building a digital twin requires curating diverse data about behavior, preferences, and/or communication style

• Approaches to using digital twins include simulation testing, objection handling, A/B testing, and narrative development

Enter digital twins, as they’re called, or the use of AI as a proxy for bouncing around ideas, themes, and conversations. They’re especially helpful to marketers, novelists, and anyone working within (or leading) a team, to name a few.

In this post, we’re going to talk about:

• Why digital twins offer speed and confidence

• How to create one with ChatGPT (including the data and prompts you’ll need)

• Patterns for interacting with them in the world of writing, marketing, and the workplace

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The cost of getting feedback

Feedback is everything. It can make or break an initiative, accelerate a career, or be the difference between the trash heap or publication. But the nuance is in the how. The difficulty of getting feedback in traditional ways (from humans) is three-fold:

1. We spend (if not waste) valuable social capital: When we ask for feedback, we’re asking someone to give us their time and mental capacity. That’s a bank that we can only pull from so many times before the well dries.

2. We waste already thin attention spans: Giving feedback requires someone’s attention. The quality of what we get back is a factor of the attention they have to give.

3. Feedback cycles take a long time: Add both of the previous things together, and delivering feedback (good, bad, or any) is typically at the end of someone’s to-do list. The result is weeks to months to get any sort of feedback.

That’s where a digital twin benefits us, we can get feedback (especially early) that strengthens our approach to the task at hand. Does it mean we don’t need feedback from humans? Likely not, but in some cases, sure. But early preparation run through a digital twin can indeed make feedback cycles with humans more effective.

And while the digital twins don’t save us from the all-important research of knowing who we’re targeting (or creating, in the case of story telling), they allow us to cycle farther and faster once we do.

Where we can use digital twins

Digital twins simulate thinking (and if needed, tone). Here are three high-impact areas where digital twins can accelerate our work:

1. Marketing and sales

We can simulate how different personas might respond to products or messages. This unlocks smarter, faster decision-making in our strategies:

• Pre-sell testing: Your twin can generate synthetic feedback on messaging, helping you refine tone, emotional appeal, or clarity.

• Persona modeling: Simulate how power users vs. skeptics will respond to launch emails, landing pages, or ads.

• Content generation: Draft posts, lead magnets, and launch assets in your brand voice, vetted through the lens of your ideal customer.

2. Novel writing and storytelling

For authors, a digital twin can be both a test audience and a tool for immersive character-building.

• Character development: Simulate a character’s internal logic and tone, to keep actions and dialogue believable and consistent across their entire story arc.

• Reader response forecasting: Predict how a reader might react emotionally to a twist or chapter ending, helping fine-tune pacing and hooks.

• Query alignment: Validate whether a manuscript query or a story pitch will resonate or fall flat.

3. Workplace productivity and culture

Digital twins can help knowledge workers simulate interpersonal dynamics and communication patterns.

• Feedback personalization: Test how a teammate or direct report might receive constructive feedback based on their profile or past behavior.

• Meeting and messaging optimization: Simulate how different framing of messages affects clarity, motivation, or buy-in.

• Change management strategy: Try out different communication plans for organizational shifts to gauge barriers or confusion.

As a safe, intelligent space to simulate reactions, digital twins let us fine-tune before it ever hits human ears. Whether you’re shipping a product, a novel, or a message, it’s low leverage and high insight.

Building your digital twin in ChatGPT

Let’s start with “Why ChatGPT”? Like I’ve previously discussed around creating your own marketing assistant, ChatGPT works better than a tool like Claude for its ability to handle large threads (as well as very long individual prompts). The idea is that I’ll keep coming back to this twin over weeks, months, or years, so that’s a must-have.

Now, on to creating our digital twin. It isn’t about replicating perfectly—it’s about building a proxy that understands the perspective and decision-making of the actual persona or person. Once set up, this twin becomes a voice on the other side of the table, capable of pressure-testing ideas, role-playing, and obtaining faster feedback.

Here’s how to build your own.

Step one: Gather the data sources for your digital twin

Before you “build” anything, you need the raw material—patterns, preferences, and POV. Collect content that reflects the thinking and/or speaking of your person/persona. This can come from any number of sources, and can include:

• Written footprints: These can be online bread crumbs like old blog posts, LinkedIn updates, or video transcripts. For character, this might look more like dialogue snippets or descriptions.

• Behavioral indicators: Habits tell a story. Think app usage patterns, frequent pain points (or questions asked), as well as desired outcomes. These build a sense of priorities and pacing.

• Direct interactions or previous feedback: Sales calls, webinars, or support conversation transcripts are gold. They reveal tone under pressure and what someone values.

• Personality profiles: Do you have access to a Myers-Briggs, ESFJ or the like? Provide those to set the foundation for both communication strategy and how your twin sees the world.

• Demographic data: I’d argue these are less important than the above (and more susceptible to skewing), but things like age and gender can be helpful baselines to provide.

Aim for relevance over volume. Start with 5–10 strong data examples across different mediums and circumstances. The more diverse the input, the more balanced the twin.

Step two: Run the digital twin creation prompt (with your collected data)

Once you’ve assembled your data, it’s time to build the twin. You’ll do this by giving ChatGPT a one-time prompt that introduces the personality and hands over the materials.

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There can be no doubting that AI gives us speed. But the greater the speed, the more the illusion of expertise. Which sounds like a bummer, and in some ways is. Perhaps the biggest being the satisfaction that comes with skill. Because while we can ship (or learn) faster than ever, the means have always been a deeper and more fulfilling topic.

So while the core competencies we once dreamed of learning are no longer untouchable, that doesn’t necessarily shorten the road to expertise. Nor does it eschew the long-term (and emotional) value of obtaining that expertise.

But it does mean there are some additional pitfalls to obtaining that expertise.

The distraction trap: how ease and speed cost us time

I’d like to think of myself as smart and curious. Both because I’ve gone to school (I was a bit more curious in my six months of dev bootcamp than my four years of undergrad), and also because I’m a self-motivated learner. I’ve studied (and I mean truly studied), a long list of different topics. Those include:

• User experience

• Graphic Design

• Software System Design

• Algorithms

• Music Theory

• Novel writing

• Audio Engineering

• Social media strategy

• Copywriting

And most of those things, I continue to study today (both because they evolve and there’s just that much to soak up). Trouble is, curiosity can lead me (and the royal we) to chase things without realizing what’s at stake. Over that same course of time, I’ve also spent time on:

• Stock trading

• Data mining

• Machine Learning

• Cryptocurrency

• Sales strategy

• Video strategy

• SEO

• Space travel

• Quantum Physics

What happens when we take that sort of curiosity into the age of AI? A land where Perplexity and Manus write us research reports and briefs in minutes. Where NotebookLM lets us upload entire library shelves worth of knowledge and ask questions of it. And where Claude and ChatGPT give us a whole new vector to “the ends justify the means”.

That just puts things into hyperdrive.

When curiosity becomes a detour

It’s tempting to know anything on that second list is more attainable. And that I can explore the foundation in the name of satisfying curiosity. But there’s a point where curiosity provides diminishing returns.

That might be because you don’t have any real application for data mining. Or maybe because you’re learning something that (if you were being honest with yourself) you don’t even care to get good at. But that line is most likely to be crossed when the things in list B (the curiosities) take away from list A (your expertise).

How can we concretely tell when that’s happening? Here are a few signals:

• When you’re doing something because you can

• You’re learning a skill you’d never want to use practically

• When we don’t read the research we create

• You feel compelled to ask the next question (like about space travel), because you asked the first one

These aren’t things that will raise red flags (unless you’re avoiding work with them). They’re drops in the wrong bucket that accrue over a long swath of time.

Expertise is a lot of things, but perhaps most importantly, it’s deeply intentional. Which is where fluency and foundation come into play.

Fluency versus foundation

There’s a certain kind of person who can walk into a room, rattle off the right concepts, and help you believe they’ve mastered what they’re describing. In other words, they’re fluent.

Foundation, on the other hand, is quieter. You can spot it in how someone asks follow-up questions. In how they pause to check their assumptions. In how they recover when something doesn’t work. Foundation means you’ve done the work—enough to know where the cracks are.

Fluency can be slippery: it rewards rhythm, vocabulary, and reading the room. Maybe you are that person—or maybe you know that person. They can speak confidently about topics, sometimes even when they’re called on it.

That’s just the world: we reward articulation over application. We assume knowledge based on delivery.

The truth is building real expertise requires both. You can do the thing and talk about the thing. Without foundation, you’re putting a nice roof on an empty house. Without fluency, you’ve built a fully livable woodshed.

Being in touch with our expertise is more important than ever

So how do we meaningfully grow our expertise? It’s analog: an honest reckoning.

It’s about your goals and a time-value alignment around those goals. Imagine your expertise as a heatmap. Some areas are glowing, others are fading. Your goal isn’t to turn off the fading lights entirely. It’s to notice where your energy goes, and that the energy is being applied where you want it to be.

That’s not easy. Not all knowledge is created equal and valuable knowledge to you can be worth far less to the next person. But by value, I don’t just mean monetary value.

Some honest questions to ask about the expertise that’s valuable for you:

• What do I love?

• What do I want to be good at?

• What do I want to share?

The point is, choosing what’s sellable isn’t the only reason to choose expertise (and there’s a case to be made that any expertise has a market, even if that market is low).

Because what I actually created was a faster way to generate mediocre content. I realized what I needed was a way to make my own style faster to apply. I needed my voice to scale without turning into a parody of myself.

Key Takeaways

• The use of templates go far beyond time-savings by helping us to inherit expertise, build confidence and avoid momentum loss in our day-to-day

• Great templates can be built from three sources (past work, a set of rules, or nothing)

• The trick? Don’t wait until you’re overwhelmed to create a template (that’s where AI comes in)

Templates are scaffolding. They don’t replace your creative process, they support it. I might even go so far as to say this is the grunt work AI was built for (it sure beats blackmail).

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So in this post, let’s talk about:

• What we get from templates (besides time-savings)

• Why you’re probably under-using templates

• Three prompts to help us quickly create new templates

What we get from templates (besides time-savings)

Templates reduce cognitive load, accelerate learning and offer built-in best practices—especially useful in unfamiliar territory. We talk a lot about how templates save time. But that’s just the surface-level benefit.

What’s more interesting, and often unconsidered, is how templates change us.

How templates help us (on a macro scale)

Over time, they build confidence. Each time you use one successfully, you reinforce your ability to complete a task. That momentum extends beyond. It’s cumulative. Quiet. Solid.

Templates reduce the weight of starting from scratch. Psychologists would call them a form of cognitive scaffolding—a mental structure that makes it easier to organize and act. They satisfy a part of us that craves patterns and predictability amidst the mess.

Templates help you start before you feel ready. Ever stared at a blank page and immediately thought about doing the dishes? That’s choice overload—too many options freeze us. Templates nudge you past the inertia by giving us a defined starting point.

Templates teach as they go. The learning is baked in, as a great template helps you learn the structure of expert work. Simply following them lets us internalize patterns—logical flow, persuasive structure, solid formatting.

On a deeper psychological level

Perhaps the deeper value lies in how they meet our emotional and psychological needs.

1. They create safety through structure. When you know what sections to fill out or what steps to follow, your anxiety goes down and your confidence goes up. Which means templates can give you a base level of competence—even in areas where you feel underqualified.

2. They protect the brain from burnout. Our brains are decision-making machines. But they have limits. A well-crafted template reduces decision fatigue by removing an entire question set from our purview.

3. They offer legitimacy when you need it most. Templates are meant to reflect best practices. So when you use one, you're standing on the shoulders of process (or successful people). That’s built-in social proof.

4. And they unlock creativity (not kill it). This one might surprise you: templates reduce perfectionism. Instead of spinning forever, you’re given a boundary. And boundaries unlock our most creative ideas.

You’re probably UNDER using templates

Most people think of templates only when they’re tackling big, obvious projects: a pitch deck, a business plan, maybe a resume. But the real magic happens in the small, repetitive friction points—the places that quietly drain away our energy.

Start there.

• Where are you constantly rewriting the same thing?

• Where does your momentum die its most slow and suffocating death?

• What makes you open a doc and immediately abandon course?

If you’re hitting keyboard fatigue, that’s a signal. If formatting issues keep derailing progress, that’s a signal. These are the moments that template well. Not because they’re high stakes, but because they’re high frequency.

Start collecting them.

Great template moments often hide in plain sight

You don’t need to build a giant Notion library to feel the benefits. Instead, look for the little things—here are a few surprisingly powerful places to start templating:

• First lines: The first sentence of an email, blog post, or LinkedIn reply

• Thank-you notes: For podcast guests, collaborators, clients

• Slide outlines: For recurring talks or internal presentations

• Weekly summaries: For team updates or personal progress logs

• Content wrappers: The way you introduce or summarize your work

• Decision frameworks: A doc format to help you think through big choices

• Intro questions: For meetings, interviews, or panels you lead

• Self-introductions: For pitching yourself to contacts, colleagues, and even friends

One thing to notice about these: they all smooth the path. The smoother the path, the less time getting started and the more time progressing or shipping. A good template isn’t about saving time once. It’s more about avoiding momentum loss.

Three ways to quickly develop templates with AI

Let’s make this practical. Here are three ways to build templates that save time and raise the floor for your day-to-day work.

Method 1: Use past work

If you’ve got a Google Doc graveyard of solid drafts or emails you’re proud of, great. Here’s a prompt to extract a reusable template from a past piece of content:

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The professional world is collapsing around us. At least in the ways that count.

We’re in a reactionary phase. Technology does this to us a lot. It involves a lot of complaints. Grievances aired. Horror stories and digital outcries. But reactionary is the moment of now, and complaints are only one choice for how we move on. There’s a line past lashing out, after which comes something to be achieved during this phase.

What are we mourning? Something different from everyone else is the definitive answer, but if we don’t allow ourselves the copout, mourning looks something like a reaction attached to:

1. Experiences had and things earned

2. Formative and life-altering moments

3. Entire journeys from point A to point B

What do these have in common? They’re massive. Unforgettable themes stamped on the film strip of life. We mourn the loss of the meaningful.

We complain about the annoyances of the inane.

All of the complaining I do is micro. I hate doing this or I wish I didn’t have to that. It’s, by definition, reactionary. Like picking something up off the table in front of us and throwing it into the far corner of the room.

The complaints you’ll see at this moment? AI takes away my ability to do this. Because of AI, we’ll never have those again.

Whether we complain or mourn is, of course, a choice. Just like a commitment to becoming a damn good copywriter. Or the satisfaction of a trip spent years in the planning.

How do we make it the easier choice? In my experience, that choice feels easier when:

• we look at what’s lost as the opportunity to gain something new

• we have a good laugh at the tropes (“learning an art is going to go away!”)

• we deepen our appreciation for whatever it is we’ve done or honed (the longer journeys)

When we mourn, we look for the good things. And when we look for the good things, we remember what was good about them. And only when we do that is there a path toward finding a satisfactory ways to replace them.

So when you think about AI, are you complaining or are you mourning?

• Google search “vets <zip-code>”

• Google Places search (like looking up “vet” in Google Maps)

That’s followed by a lot of clicking, maybe some spreadsheet creation, two saved restaurants and a burnt out candle. Within 45 minutes, you’ve got a top three list. But is it thorough? Am I confident that I’ve gotten all the good facts? Ultimately, no and no.

In this post we’re going to cover the idea of super search, including:

1. What it means and how to know when to use it

2. Which tool works best for super search

3. Navigating the situational nuances for faster and more valuable searching

Key Takeaways

• Super search improves the efficiency of bigger, multi-criteria searches (like finding veterinarians), reducing time and clicks

• Unlike traditional Google searches, we can add more situational detail for better structured and personalized results (especially for comprehensive, multi-dimensional queries)

• Perplexity and ChatGPT data outputs stand out, while Perplexity brings a more search-like and research-style experience

Bringing in super search

Getting the same “mostly good” facts in less time (and clicks), that’s super search. There’s nothing fancy about it, it just enhances a regular old Google search with the likes of AI (via an AI browser or chat tool). Honestly, I’m not doing this for better info. I’m doing this because the responses are being given to me in ways that are easiest for me.

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A good super search should:

• Get me more options in less time

• Give me better quality of info in less time

• Get me all of that data in the format I can keep it (and compare it)

And in return, I need to give the correct set of details and the correct ask. That’s where AI search is just better. One criteria (like proximity) can suffice, but that’s not always how I’m going to search, is it? Super searching allows for multi-dimensional criteria, because we care about proximity, online reputation, and emergency service availability. You know, the criteria owners of geriatric animals have to weigh accordingly.

In this case, my details are personalized with a clear location (Zip code 63303) and some context (a 10-year-old miniature schnauzer).

Super search tools

Perplexity has been a favorite for this, and before that Copilot and before that… well, virtual assistants, I suppose. But ChatGPT and others continue to add search capabilities. Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity have always had them, if I recall correctly.

We’re going to use the same vet-finding prompt across three different tools:

• Perplexity (two search types: “Search”, “Research”)

• ChatGPT (“Search”)

• Google Gemini

Perplexity (Search, Research)

Perplexity is fast, structured just enough, and does one thing incredibly well: replace the clunky, multi-tabbed crawl.

For my vet search, Perplexity Research is where I started. I thought “oh, research” and that seems like it’s just what I’m doing. Alas, that didn’t work at all and only gave me a lot of soft advice and a pep talk. In retrospect, when compared to a functionality named “Search”, it makes more sense.

When I switched to Perplexity Search and used the same prompt, that’s when I got a list of locations. It had eight different clinics and all of the data in all of the columns I asked for. Which I don’t take for granted.

While I didn’t click into any sources, it’s both nice to see a picture (mostly to check for anything bad). It’s also the element that most gives it a “search-like” experience.

The results from Perplexity Search:

• Provided the most precise distances (e.g., "0.9 mi", "7.5 mi")

• Listed the most specific review counts (e.g., "525", "347")

• Included unique details like "LGBTQ+ friendly", "Fear Free certified"

• Maintained the most consistent data format across all listings

ChatGPT

I did use ChatGPT’s search capability for this one. It’s just a quick toggle within the text box of a chat thread.

In terms of the actual returned quality of the response, ChatGPT held up nicely to Perplexity’s results.

The results from ChatGPT:

• Review counts ("200+", "150+") and distances (“~4 miles”) felt more like estimates than Perplexity’s

• Offered especially detailed notes with service descriptions

• Denoted specialized facilities like "Pet Urgent Care" with specific hours

Google Gemini

Though I did love that Gemini allowed me to export to sheets, it’s result gave me the lowest level of trust in that A) it gave me more listings that were far away and B) it told me ratings of a clinic, but didn’t have any deeper indicators like number of reviews.

The results from Google Gemini:

• Like ChatGPT, approximate distances (ranges like "~1-2 miles")

• Mostly mentions review counts without exact numbers (saying things like "Based on reviews mentioned")

• Lists several facilities considerably farther away (10-17 miles)

That said, Google Gemini also gave me a bunch of considerations for my search. Which was nice of it. So was the reminder of the things I should talk to my new vet about. It wasn’t enough to keep it out of third place though.

And the winner is…

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Lauren, my host, had a ton of deep thinkers in her set of questions, and one of my favorite parts of this discussion was when she asked about the out-of-the-box myth of AI.

In short, the idea that everything should be given to us. Which is in short, the idea we’ve been sold about AI. For better or (typically much) worse. My response to Lauren:

“I think the out-of-the-box implies, you know, I don't have to work towards it. I don't have to have a, a sense of my own unique situation. I don't have to approach it as a skill as opposed to a tool. Which truly, I think that's, that's one of the things that makes somebody successful, is that mindset. Um, but then it also, I, I think it, it lends itself to not understanding what context and what's important to give AI so that it can help understand what you're trying to accomplish.”

But the more I thought about it, the more there was to latch onto. And with that evolution of thought, I wanted to chew on this some more here. So let’s look at what’s played into it and how we succeed once we do a thorough jig on it’s grave.

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The reasons for the myth

I think there are three reasons for this myth. But it truly is one big reason and a couple of sidekicks.

Reason number one, the biggest reason, is this is what we’re being sold. It’s not intentional, mind you, but the undertone of most everything we heard about AI (at least for the first two years) was that it was capable of replacing us and/or could do things without us. Which is a big distinction from “for us”.

How were we sold this, but more importantly, why was it so believable?

We’ve been surrounded by software for decades, none of which truly works out-of-the-box. Upload something, set up a template, add a connector. There’s always a large amount to do before clicking the button. So it’s not that SaaS has trained us to expect frictionless starts. It’s that we’ve been told “Artificial Intelligence” is just that much more advanced.

Adding on to this is the paradox that, the more complex an AI tool is, the less it’s creators can tell me how to use it. That’s always been a bit of an unspoken truth for software in general. There’s googling things, and then there’s being good at crafting queries—and that’s the simplest example. But the talk about “plug-and-play automation” or “immediate value with zero setup” is more easily swallowed in the nebulous word clouds of AI tooling. When in reality, we’re giving into the belief that the best versions of our workflows are waiting in the trunk of someone else’s car.

Worse still, AI is being promoted as if it’s the same for everyone. On the one hand, there’s truth to its strength as being universal. But on the other, the real competency lives in specificity. It’s built of our data, our understanding, and our goals. None of which are out “out-of-the-box”.

The hype doesn’t help, nor does the flooding of the market. But it goes deeper than that. The question of what’s possible versus what’s useful is a bigger (and more personal) question than most people are realizing.

How we respond accordingly

So with the myth shattered, what can we do to pick up the pieces and operate at our best?

Work with the ultimate balance of cynicism and optimism

When it doesn’t work immediately, we assume we’re the problem. It doesn’t help either that product demos are always cherry-picked to impress. Everything just works and we don’t see the broken attempts or the weird thread detours. The cynicism comes in a healthy reminder that when things don’t work, it’s not you, it’s the abstraction.

Optimism on the other hand, is encouraging a foundation of “this will work”. You don’t try things hoping they’ll go poorly. That basic truth easily applies to the basic units of writing a prompt or building a workflow.

Marry skill and mindset

One of the things I come back to often is that skill-building doesn’t look like mastery; it looks like willingness. Willingness to exemplify to a tool how you think. Willingness to work through the bad and build an intuition.

And quite frankly, a willingness to look at the idea of skill in a new light. To think of AI as a skill is to look at the melding of three things:

• Self-awareness: To identify where we can augment ourselves, we need an idea of not only the goal but even the smallest intuition of how we’d attack that goal.

• Communication: Central to prompting are the fine arts of being concise, asking for what we want and knowing when to leave things unsaid.

• Discipline: The age of AI means the age of content overload. The discipline comes in knowing what’s important and cutting anything that’s not worth taking away.

Unlearn what needs to be unlearned

If we can accept the myth is just that, we can do some helpful rewiring of AI as we know it.

The first is abandoning the “one perfect prompt” mindset. Most of the time, the best use of time isn’t hunting a magic string—it’s typing five dumb ones and iterating to success. Messiness is a part of most effective processes at one time or another.

Another is how we engage with new tools. We have to view what a tool thinks it can do versus what it lets you build into. Any suggestions of how a tool augments us are just that: suggestions. Rather than trying to mimic example workflows, a better question becomes: how quickly can I shape this tool around my weirdness?

And perhaps most broadly is embracing the messiness. Which isn’t to say it’s entirely unavoidable as much as AI has (deservedly) added a lot more tools to our toolbelts. We’re going to find ourselves jumping between them. And we’re going to find ourselves with responses we don’t like. Why to delete a thread that didn’t deliver much? Do it. Want to keep it? It’s a choice of comfort and intuition, and one we can all make.

Be vocal users

Instead of hoping a tool matches our workflow, we can pivot from passive to active. Instead of expecting the tool (or the team creating it) to read our minds, we can provide feedback. The value that you build might help you the most, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t translatable pieces. Software is a living, breathing thing, and most of the AI tools I’ve interacted with I’ve found to be open and agile to change.

Because once you let go of the out-of-the-box myth, the more the door opens to an actual system that fits. And that’s where the real returns live.

See the full podcast at ManageEngine: How everyday users can actually make gen AI work for them

• 1:00 Why AI isn’t working the way most people expect it to

• 3:43 The myth of “out-of-the-box” AI success

• 7:00 The four buckets of practical AI

• 13:08 Blending AI into individual workflows

• 17:57 The importance of intuition in effective AI use

• 24:53 How companies can support AI adoption

• 30:24 AI’s limitations and human creativity

I’m completely onboard, at least partly because of an unhealthy allegiance to a one-day old joke. But from a design perspective, it’s interesting. Two perspectives really. For starters, there’s a fun but functional design question we can ask: “What’s a one sentence way to describe the aesthetic difference between thing A and thing B?” In this case, a regular trash bag and a Demogorgon one.

On its own, asking that type of comparison question is a strong exercise. One where you create a box and use inhibition to spark fresh thinking. It’s something any software or physical ware can benefit from; it’s even good exercise for our hardware (the brain).

It’s valuable, because even in a box of ‘one sentence’, there are an unthinkable amount of valid ideas. Two of which are:

• A small garbage bag that’s not circular but has four arms or straps sticking out

• A still-functional trash bag that resembles a demogorgon from Stranger Things

Look at the differences in those two descriptions and imagine how you’d take those two ideas. Which leads me to the second perspective (and where things collide with AI): prompt philosophy. When used effectively, one great sentence or description can wildly change a response.

As much as I use AI, I don’t do all that much with image generation.

But as I’m working on a songwriter’s handbook for audio engineering, I decided it just wouldn’t do without images. Truthfully, it might not work with images but that’s what the POC phase is for.

Unlike some of my other posts which are experimental in nature, this one is a success story. I got an image series of nine quality and cohesive graphics that were actually up to my standard. What it took:

• Having an idea of what I wanted out of images

• Turning to ChatGPT to write a great and repeatable image generation prompt

• Generating images using that prompt with Google Gemini

• Working some magic in Adobe Express to clean up a few things (like unsolicited text)

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Key Takeaways

• Generate a cohesive image series by clearly defining a visual style and using a repeatable prompt structure

• Faster rendering, better downloads, and more visually consistent outputs made Gemini the choice generating a series

• Even with a well-written prompt, image generation still requires post-editing—like removing unusable auto-generated text or dimension quirks

Determining the style for my images

Even though I’m just working on a proof concept, I wanted images because images give my beta readers more of an experience. And to that end, not just any images would work.

But as opposed to having a concrete stylistic vision, I knew a bit about what I didn’t want. That list included:

1. Stock photos or realism

2. Things that were way too busy

3. A bunch of images that didn’t have any sense of cohesion

That last one is pretty important for me, and online books in general. Quite frankly, I didn’t have a lot of hope any of the image generation tools I use could meet this need. But I was pleasantly surprised.

Writing the image generation prompt (with ChatGPT’s help)

Anyone who’s been reading for a while knows I’m pretty big on having AI help write me better prompts (also known as metaprompting). That’s what I typically do in cases like this. And it actually paid off in spades for this purpose of generating an image series.

Here’s the metaprompt I used and the details I gave ChatGPT to help me write it:

Write me a prompt for generating images that has a strict theme and that I can use to create multiple images with the same style. 

All images will be header images for a book on audio engineering (recording, mixing and mastering) that I'm hosting in notion. The header images should be 1200x630 dimensions at 150ppi. This prompt should take core idea from me, but all imagery should be minimalistic while maintaining slight curves. 

Again, I want to be able to create REPEATABLE images that have the same style, as if you can tell they are in a series.

There are few reasons why I think this worked so well.

I really hammered home the idea that I wanted a series of images. If there was one way to get a sense of cohesion, I felt like AI would understand the concept of a series the best. Mentioning things like a reusable prompt or similar styles felt like underkill. So I went with the overkill.

Additionally, I think a strong description of the purpose of these images helped, both in support of the theme and Gemini’s ability to select style. I think being explicit about the purpose of these images (mentioning “book” as well as “hosting in notion” and “header images”) played an important part of my success with generating images that fit.

What I don’t think made too much of a difference was the inclusion of dimensions. I mention it more in the end of this post, but nothing I generated really stuck to the 1200x630 pixel ask.

Generating the image series with Google Gemini

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• Chat tools have overly flexible boundaries

• Code tools have no concept of a unit of work

• …

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