The Understory Dispatch #13 - Its OK To Do Dumb Things Sometimes (AI Exception 1)

Earlier this month I competed in a jujitsu tournament.  To put this into perspective, I have only been doing the sport for 16 months.  This makes me what is called a two stripe white belt.  Now, there are a lot of white belts out there but there aren’t a lot of 225lb 52 year old white belts out there.  This means that when I fight I have to go down in age brackets or fight in what is called the Absolute Bracket which is any age, any weight.  

For this tournament I fought in both the adult masters (30+) bracket and the absolute bracket.  Today I am going to talk about the Absolute bracket.  I didn’t really think through the “any weight, any age” thing when I signed up.  I just wanted to get some fights.

The second place winner in the picture above weighs 270 pounds and is 32 years younger than me.  The first place guy is 25 years younger than me and was about 240 lbs.  I took third.  The division that is actually closer to my age, the masters bracket was immediately after the Absolute division.  When I did those fights I was exhausted and got crushed.

The biggest lesson that I learned is that father time is a real thing.  As much as I would like to pretend that I can overcome any age difference, this is simply not the case.  The men that I fought just were getting started when I began to get really tired.  Going forward, I will only fight people in the same weight class and as close to my age as possible.

I probably could have figured this out if I would have thought about it for more than 30 seconds when I signed up but I didn’t.  That is ok.  I didn’t get hurt and now I know.  I learned a lesson from doing something dumb and dangerous. 

Exceptions Can Be Made For Changing Circumstances

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dumb and dangerous.  I am dead set against it for using it to write things.  In fact, the inaugural issue of this newsletter states my case plainly in the title: A Letter Of Defiance:  Grammarly, ChatGPT, and the Hemingway Application Are the Sworn Enemy Of The Writer.  

However, in business, hard line rules can cost you a lot of money.  The marketplace is always changing.  On the writing side of things, I still have a bright line rule that I don't use AI for my writing.  This isn't to say that it can't be used at all, however.  The market continues to evolve and so am I on this issue.

I have come to the conclusion that AI can be very useful for research.  If it can cut time in this area, then it gives me leverage.  Using it in this way does not take away my writing reps at all.  I actually have more time to practice my writing because I am not spending time on tasks that don't improve my writing (or would only marginally do so).

(Caveat: This only applies to topics that you already know need to be explored. Don’t use it to brainstorm ideas for you or when you are exploring rabbit holes on your own.)

You have to decide for yourself how much and in what way you will use this technology.  Just remember that your beliefs on this issue don't have to be set in stone, especially if they are in contravention of business principles that have stood the test of time long before AI was anything other than a science fiction dream.

Money Is Attracted To Speed

Have you ever heard money is attracted to speed?  Money is a form of stored energy. I expend energy doing a task and I get paid money for it. The money represents that energy. Strangely enough, this means that money has some properties of energy.

If you look at a flywheel, it takes a lot of energy to get it going but not a lot to keep it going.  Momentum is a sciency thingy that I have no idea how it works, I just know that it does.

Business is the same way.  When you are just killing it, things come a lot easier than when you are starting out or worse, when you take your foot off the gas.  This is why, when in doubt, just take action.  Any action.  Action improves everything. Even wrong action where you get feedback to nudge you in the right direction.  Lots of action generates momentum. Momentum attracts money. Money attracts more money.

(And then they’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends ad infinitum….)

You know this to be true just from your observations. The whole rich get richer cliché is true for a lot of reasons like connections etc, but one of the reasons is momentum is real.  If you pick one thing and do a lot of it, you get better at it. 

Client acquisition as a writer is no different.  If you want to build a writing as a service business take a ton of action in the space and see what happens.  In order to do this you must have the actual time to invest in this area.  You can’t get good clients if you don’t have the time to build your client acquisition assets.  This is where AI can be of some assistance.  

AI is great for things that you don’t have a depth of knowledge in.  Sometimes you will pick up a new client that is in a vertical that is completely new to you.  Onboarding in these situations can take up a lot of time getting yourself up to speed.  Given that AI at this point is basically a lightning fast search engine (don’t @ me tech bros), you can have it educate you on practically anything with about an 80% accuracy rate.

This is more than enough, in conjunction with your client interviews, to get you off and running to write in almost any area that isn’t too technical.  Even then, you can pull it off in an emergency.  I used AI for a crash course in actuarial science for one of my current clients.  This helped me get through the initial phase of writing until I had enough reps to get my sea legs on the project.

Again, I am not saying that you should use AI for writing.  If you are forced to resort to having it generate content that you then edit, it means that your planning and execution skills need some work.  Focus on making those better and stop using AI as a writing crutch.

Studies are starting to come out that AI actually makes you cognitively worse over time.  I think it is OK for the research use case I talked about above but deploy it judiciously.  Otherwise, you may find yourself competing against people who are in an entirely different class than you altogether.  You probably won’t be happy with the results. 

Choose wisely.

Irregular Means Irregular

If you haven’t noticed, this newsletter comes out inconsistently.  This is by design.  I get to it when I get to it.  If you want to hear from me on these topics on a much more regular basis (daily-ish), you can follow me on X/Twitter here: @understorybard

More in a bit . . . Wade, The Understory Bard

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