I hit send at 1:30 AM

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I’m what is known as a “strategic procrastinator.”

I push off the “small things” while I find a way to keep working on the “big things.”

A few Sundays ago, I was up late packing up our Winnebago EKKO for a three-week tour of the Northeast in search of higher altitudes, cooler temperatures, and catching up with family and friends. To Lisi’s frustration, I was also in the final stretches of editing the manuscript of my upcoming book Autonomy Architecture: Use Sales to Build a Life No Employer Can Touch.

Book = big. Packing = small.

This was the order in my mind at least. I hit send to ship off my manuscript to James, my editor, around 1:30 AM. Then, I got some sleep, and the next morning we were off to Highlands, North Carolina, as the first stop on our adventure.

I shipped over 57,000 words across four pillars and 16 chapters. This is a book that took 20 years to live and about 365 days to actually write.

Here’s also something I’m not afraid to admit: I didn't create it alone.

That doesn’t mean I had a ghostwriter, crowd-sourced it, or that I outsourced it to AI. Those are the only three options everyone assumes exist, and the point of this edition is that there's a fourth one, and it’s a way of orchestrating the big projects in your life—the kind that brings huge fulfillment and creates an asymmetric impact on the world using your unique capabilities.

Where most smart pros get things wrong with working with AI, especially writing: they start with the machine. They open a blank prompt, they ask for something, it generates something in return, and then they spend their time editing copy a robot wrote. What comes out reads like everyone else's slop, because it is everyone else's—trained and assembled from the same average of all writing online.

Last week I told you writing was my one unreasonable edge. If I'd handed that edge to a model and asked it to be me, I would have spent the first few decades of my life building something and then thirty seconds giving it away.

So I inverted the order. The machine didn't write, and then I edited. I set the standards, and the machine worked inside it, so it allowed me to write my own words better.

That's what orchestrating better actually means. Back in the Chapter 2 excerpt I sent two weeks ago, I said this:

Let’s break it down. These three components of the system did most of the heavy lifting.

I started off by loading seven years of my writing on LinkedIn—every post and article. Then I gave it all of my essays I shipped out via email, workshop transcripts, lessons from The Purposeful Performer, and voice memos I'd recorded on walks and forgotten about.

Then I went back through the pile and stack-ranked them with a weighted score.

On one end, my big essays and mastermind workshops were weighted 7 points. On the other end, peripheral material like random voice notes, saved articles, and things I had bookmarked but never acted on dropped as low as 0.5. Everything else, like my top-performing LinkedIn posts, fell somewhere in between.

Think about how you ramp up as a new seller (or would ramp one up if you were their manager, coach, or mentor). You don't start with the entire company knowledge base and say "figure out how we sell here." You say: “Read these three win stories first; they're how we actually do it. Then the deck. Ignore anything from before the last platform release.”

You do this instinctively with people, and almost never with machines.

I didn't want an assistant. I wanted a sparring partner.

An assistant agrees with you and returns basic work. A sparring partner makes you better by pushing back. But this requires trust.

So I gave it a trust score out of 100, and it couldn’t earn a place on my “book team” until it proved itself.

The number I started it at was arbitrary. We'd been working together a while by then, so I gave it something in the low twenties and moved on. Pick whatever feels right for where you're starting. What matters is that a number exists at all, because the moment you install a scoreboard the whole thing turns into a game you're playing instead of a tool you're using.

It earned points by proving it understood my work—not summarizing it, but fully understanding it. I'd ask questions with no answer anywhere in the source material and watch whether it could reason from my frameworks the way the intended reader or I would.

Points came off for three things:

That third one is often missed. Every time it called a passage "powerful" or "compelling" without being able to say precisely why, it lost trust. Praise is not comprehension. A sparring partner who lets you win isn't a sparring partner, and a machine that agrees with everything you write is worth about as much as a manager who always tells you you’re doing fine.

It never wrote a line of my prose from scratch.

It could propose a line, and it had to show where it came from in my original writing: “here's the old sentence, here's the new one, here's why the change earns its place.” Then I accepted it, rejected it, or wrote something better than both.

It’s the same posture you'd take with a redlined MSA from an account’s legal team. You don't sign an agreement because the markup looks professional from the original standard contract. You and your legal team read every clause in detail and figure out if it makes sense or not.

It's slower. But every sentence in that manuscript passed through my hands and was enhanced in the process.

That's the shape of the whole system—turning something you’ve already created into a more valuable offer:

FEED → ABSORB → ARCHITECT → DRAFT → REFINE

This was full-on vibe writing for me. I brought the vibe—my actual voice, my scars, and my way of seeing things—and the machine helped me structure it and move at a speed I’d never be able to achieve on my own.

But it’s not just for writing.

This is how you can vibe-build anything built around your unique knowledge and interests. It works the same whether you're building a book, an email to a prospect, an app, a side business, a newsletter, or the financial architecture that finally gets you out of corporate faster and doing your own thing.

→ Hit reply and tell me the one thing you'd finish in the next 90 days if the building bottleneck disappeared. I read every response, and these are directly shaping Learning Path 6.

I'm not going to send you off with a philosophy and no instructions.

Here's the smallest piece of the system. It takes only about 25 minutes, and it instantly upgrades your output from AI collaboration. This works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever you're already using.

Step one. Find five things you wrote that only you could have written. Not your company's collateral. Not a template. The pre-call email that landed the meeting nobody else could get. The narrative business case that landed you a deal 3x the company’s ACV. The strategic account plan you sent a colleague the other day because they asked. Look in Sent Mail—that's where most of your best work is buried.

Step two. Upload all five. Then paste this:

These five artifacts are mine. They outrank every other source you have. When your instincts about good writing conflict with what's in these artifacts, these artifacts win.

Before you write anything for me, tell me in your own words: what is my point of view, and where would I break from the conventional advice in my field? If you're not sure, say so.

Step three. Read what comes back out loud.

If it just gives you praise or a summary that could describe anyone else in your industry, it hasn't fully absorbed your uniqueness yet. Feed it more and ask again.

If it tells you something true about your own thinking you've never quite put into words, or pushes back on you with something you actually have to consider—that's the breakthrough moment. You've stopped talking to an assistant and started engaging with a true sparring partner.

And read everything it gives you out loud going forward. If it doesn't sound like you talking, it isn't ready. That test alone will save you more than any prompt I could hand you.

Then keep the conversation. Don't start fresh tomorrow.

I didn’t write my book from scratch. Seven years of writing every single week wrote the book. What the machine did was collapse the distance between the mounting pile and something that resembles a finished product.

And you have more of a body of work than you think. Every pre-call email. Every deal review. Every account narrative you wrote before a first meeting. It's scattered across multiple drives, various apps, numerous folders, and three employers. You've never once looked at it as an asset.

It is the asset.

Last week you named the one unreasonable skill you're going to own. The process above is how it stops being a skill you have and turns into a capability that pays you more, gives you more options, and frees up more of your calendar.

Would you be proud to put your name on it? If so, then that’s when you know it’s time to ship it.

We’re getting close to launching Learning Path 6 and putting this all into action. See you next week!

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