​Read in Browser​

I feel like the world is speeding up.

If you spend any time in AI-adjacent spaces, “something big is coming.”

There are sci-fi style predictions that are tanking Wall Street (and providing great cover for tech companies doing massive layoffs).

And I’m feeling the pressure every day to accelerate my learning around AI.

How can I do something useful with my notes? Do I need an AI assistant? Should I make a custom GPT or an AI digital twin? What app should I be vibecoding now?

But most importantly… if I don’t ramp up my learning game and race headfirst into using AI tools, will I ultimately be left behind?

I have noticed that the everyday anxiety I was feeling just due to the state of the culture and whiplash of the US political climate right now has taken a marked step up in the last 3 months.

I’m doing my best to resist it.

I’m listening to thought leaders who are challenging or debunking the AI reporting.

(Cal Newport and Ed Zitron have a wonderful podcast on that and the state/incentives of AI reporting).

I’m reading articles about how AI fatigue — the pressure to ship more and more and the toll that speed is taking on people’s capacity — is as real as the AI learning curve.

But… also I’m trying to step back.

Do I actually want the results that these AI tools are promising me? Do I want to speed up the activities that AI is promising to help me with?

Or would that optimize for the wrong thing in the business?

Last year, I took an AI agents class by a well-known online marketing and ghostwriting agency.

I wanted to dip my toes into the AI space, so I (over-paid) for an accelerator designed to build you an AI agent whose first job was to help you take your long-form content and turn it into proven short-form content.

I had to set up all of these systems: Supabase, Replit, n8n, Slack.

I did my content voice interview.

I uploaded my best content.

And then I got to work!

Every week, I’d upload my long-form content and tell the Slack agent to make my LinkedIn posts.

About a third of the time, the agent failed in the back end somewhere and I didn’t know how to fix it.

A third of the time, I’d get content that sounded like an entrepreneurial casino bro wrote it (a lot because the “proven templates” were written by men, selling the dream of entrepreneurship on X.)

And the final third of the time, I managed to get content that I’d be happy to post.

And yet… I posted maybe 1 or 2 of the posts?

I spent hours setting up the system, following all of the “best practices”.

I spent time every week for a few months wrestling with the system to get it to create the right output (or any output at all when the “agent” stopped responding and I had to re-boot the system).

And yet… I hate growing my business through snappy-as-hell short form posts on LinkedIn or Substack notes.

I don’t want to read that content.

I don’t want to write that content.

I don’t want to respond to comments on those posts on the platforms, because when I've made these polished posts on social, they inevitably attract people who just use AI tools to comment on them instead of my friends who I really want to talk to!

The agent-to-agent doom loop, leading to the ensloppification of the Internet.

Sure, the agent was “faster” than I was at creating short-form (though… that’s actually questionable given how much time I had to spend wrestling and editing it).

But, even if I was "saving time", I was still devoting time to get faster at activities that really don’t help my business, and taking that time away from the important work that drives results.

Where you get benefits might be where I get friction.

As with all of my advice, use your own judgment about where AI can support you in your business.

The AI use case that saves someone else hours might be the one that creates more work for me.

Every “AI assistant” or AI scheduling tool I’ve ever implemented has inevitably created more friction because I’ve developed deep intuition about when I want to do things in my business, how much work I can take on, and which deliverables and commitments are fixed versus flexible — and I’m not interested in spending the time to train a system to do that for me and still have to monitor it for when it gets it wrong.

I don’t want something in my email or my files processing and organizing them for me, be that an AI agent or even a human assistant. Maybe it’s luddite of me, but that’s how I develop the metacognition of what’s happening in my business and how I want to organize my brain.

But for you? These services might be a game changer in your business.

I’m rejecting the premise of speed and acceleration, even if that costs me money

I don’t want to send you email campaigns 3-4 times a week, always making you an offer. Sure, that might make more money for me, but that’s not why I’m in business.

I don’t want to grow my audience by posting incessantly on social media and contributing to the noise on that platform.

I don’t want to “infinitely scale” my business and speed my way to that result.

My business grows and works for me when I slow down. When I compost ideas and mull them over in my head.

My ideas sharpen when I wrestle with how to articulate them on slides, even when Claude could make those slides for me.

I have a desired scale for the business I want, that feels good in my body, that grows at the pace of my nervous system — not the promised pace of AI acceleration.

Ultimately, “up and to the right forever and ever” business growth isn’t my objective. So why would I be optimizing for that?

Would it be reckless to avoid learning about AI entirely?

For my business, yes. There are amazing use cases I want to explore. And I do have to consider how my business delivers value — education, discernment, implementation, community — and what AI means for each of those components differently. The answer isn’t the same across all four.

But I don’t want to “learn AI” to get faster at the wrong things in my business.

I need to slow down to reckon with:

• How does my business actually work?
• How does it grow, and how do I want it to grow?
• What’s most important for me to strengthen or build next in my business?
• Can AI be an enabler to that focus instead of a shiny distraction or an existential threat?

I encourage you to do the same reckoning before leaping headfirst into acceleration.

In an era when you can do more, choosing what you should do becomes more important.

Fun fact: that “AI agent” program I implemented? They’ve moved off of all of those complicated integrations and just moved to Claude Cowork. Sometimes being a fast follower saves you far more time and money than racing to the frontier.

NEW EPISODES

Is it burnout or boredom? Every business owner hits that point where the thing that used to light them up now feels like a slog — and it usually happens right when the work matters most. Whether it’s February fatigue, launch number seven, or the creeping suspicion that you’ve said everything you have to say, the impulse to burn it down and start fresh is real. But is it burnout, boredom, or just a season? Listen to the Pod

Jessica Lackey on the entrepreneurial casino, why social media stopped working, and playing the long game | Imperfect Creatives I spent money for courses that led nowhere, wondering what I was doing wrong. Then I found Jessica's book and the perfect name she’s given to this: the entrepreneurial casino. ​ Reading the book was a huge relief. Not because she makes it sound easy. If anything Jessica does the opposite by telling you clearly how much work is actually involved in building something resilient, how long it really takes, and why most of what you’ve been sold is nonsense. ​ I was lucky enough to get to chat with Jessica, and I’ve written up a few of my favourite highlights below. Listen to the Pod