Let’s suppose you are strolling through the red-light district in Amsterdam browsing for a night of hot, steamy sex. (Of course, you would never do that! But go along with me here.) As you view your available options, would you be more likely to procure the services of a shop with a sex doll in the window…or would you select a real live human making eye contact with you?
Imagine another scenario…
Picture in your mind, your ideal client. Exactly the kind of person or company that you would love to work with. The kind of client who honors their contract, pays early, and follows through doing everything required on their end. If you had one chance to make a first impression and tell them about who you are and what you can do for them – would you like it to be an averaged-out template generated by AI, or your heartfelt words?
Because if you’re one of the many that believe, “My AI can crank out all my emails, posts, proposals, and even write my books,” that’s the question I would ask you.
This is another follow up to this post where I shared that if I lost everything, there are three skills I would use to get it all back quickly. Which takes us back to the second skill…
Write So People Believe
After 16 books, more than 10,000 blog posts, and crafting copy that has generated billions of dollars in revenues, I can tell you this:
Writing is never about just the words.
First, great writing is the result of great thinking. The blank page is the one place you find out whether you actually understand what you believe, or you're just parroting things that sound smart at dinner parties. Outsource the writing and you're not saving time. You're outsourcing the thinking. And the thinking is the whole point. Because in my experience…
If you can't write it, you don't really know it.
Every muddy sentence is a muddy thought that needs to be run through the car wash of critical thinking. The fight to make a paragraph clear is actually the fight to make your own thinking clear. And sooner or later the gap between sounding smart and being smart exposes everybody who's faking it.
Second, and most importantly, writing is also the result of feeling. There’s no AI in the world that can convey the passion, pride, and ownership you feel about something. If you outsource your soul, you’re probably going to be disappointed in who it attracts.
The first time you let the machine write it, it feels like a shortcut. The tenth time, it feels normal. The hundredth time, you couldn't write it yourself if your life depended on it. And you never even felt it happen, because the output looked fine the whole way down. (If you don’t believe me, look at the last 15 posts you saw on LinkedIn.)
That's the real danger. Not lousy copy. Mental atrophy. You outsource the reps, and the thinking and feeling muscles you were supposed to be building waste away in the dark. And the message that’s representing you isn’t reflecting you in your best light.
Which takes us back to the third skill I wrote about…
Building Signal
Everything I preach comes back to signal and having a point of view — the stuff that makes the market chase you instead of the other way around. You send out enough signal, and you create what I call Market Gravity. But know this:
Generic is the antithesis of Market Gravity.
And know this too: AI's factory setting is the mushy middle average of everything ever written. (a/k/a mediocrity2) If you let AI ghostwrite for you, you don't just lose your voice…you torch the one asset that was pulling people toward you in the first place. Your signal degrades into white noise in an ocean full of it.
I'm not a tech Luddite screeching from the wilderness. I use these tools every single day. A lot. I’m suggesting you collaborate with AI to create a dyad as described here.
There's a Grand Canyon between using a tool to sharpen your thinking and using it to skip your thinking altogether. One makes you dangerous. The other makes you disappear in the forest of meaningless noise.
Your voice is not some minor feature to be automated out of your life. It's the last thing on this planet that is unmistakably, unrepeatably yours. In a world drowning in machine-made sameness, the person who still thinks, feels, and writes won't just stand out from the crowd. They'll be one of the only ones left worth paying attention to.
Peace,
– RG
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