That wasn't luck

Before you start: Have you completed your Autonomy Architecture Blueprint?

Your results will personalize this entire learning path.

Welcome to the primer for Learning Path 6: Human First AI Fluency. Today you'll write down what makes you good at your work, in your own words, and save it as the first page of a library you own. It takes one 50-minute session.

This week, an Inner Circle member told me about a deal he'd just won in about 45 days. The buying team had a tight timeline, and every vendor promised to meet it. He told them nobody knew enough about their business to promise that, laid out his requirements for working together, and made his recommendation based on value and risk. They chose to work with him and his company.

Then he said, "I just got lucky."

"That's not luck," I told him. "That's you coming in with a very strong point of view." I suggested he capture it somewhere he can revisit, so the next time he wants to say "I got lucky," he can read what he actually did.

Later in the call, he said his company had recently redrawn its territories, and he has no idea which accounts he'll have next year. That's what I call the Leased Life. We lease the accounts, even our own pipeline, and others make the decisions that affect our career trajectory. "Even if the decision can’t always be yours," I said, "the preparation has to be yours."

Before we hung up, he said he'd keep writing down his win strategies. "If nothing else," he said, "it'll remind me of stuff that I should be doing in deals that I probably have forgotten to do."

You have nothing to lose and only gain by writing down what makes you unique. Because what feels common to you now will be valuable to others down the road.

Part of the path from the Leased Life to the Owned Life is writing down what makes you unique. Here's the difference, in five questions:

AI can help you sharpen what makes you unique, but it can only use what you give it. So before you unleash AI, build your library: a written record, in your own words, of what makes you good, kept somewhere you own.

→ Human: 10 minutes, no screen. Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On the left, write what lifts your battery at work. On the right, write what drains it. Be specific, such as: "walking a CFO through the numbers," not "in-person meetings." Then circle the one or two things on the left that make you unique (only you in your company seems to do them consistently). Find one win where you did them, maybe even a win you've been calling “luck.” If none comes to mind, use your best moment from the last 90 days.

→ Professional: 20 minutes. Pay “the tax.” Write up that win by hand or by voice, as if you were teaching it to someone newer than you: the situation, what you saw that others missed, what you did, and why it worked. It can be messy, as long as every word is yours.

→ AI: 15 minutes. Now let the AI do what it does best: organizing. Open a new chat in whatever AI you use (or your company allows). Type in or upload a photo of your battery list and your write-up, leaving out customer names and anything your company wouldn't want shared. Then paste this prompt:

→ Back to you: 5 minutes. Read the page out loud and cross out anything that doesn't sound like you. Answer one of the AI's questions in your own words and add it to the page. Then save it somewhere you own, like a personal drive, not your work laptop. That's page one of your library.

I started writing down what made me different back when I was still selling, and it made me better at the job. Then it let me leave the corporate world at 42, as my writing on LinkedIn opened new doors and opportunities I could pursue on my terms.

Seven years later, that writing lives in at least six places: 189 posts in The Purposeful Performer, a book manuscript, an ebook I wrote in 2021, my LinkedIn posts, voice notes in Otter, and the guides behind my lessons. Every word is human-made, and some AI-adapted.

This week, I'm pulling it into one library I own, with AI helping me sort and organize it. That library will be what my AI twin works from. I'll show you where it stands next Wednesday.

How I made this primer: I pulled the human part from this week’s coaching call and my own notes. Claude drafted from them, and I checked every line.

Hit reply (or comment below if you're reading on the web) with one sentence: the win you'd been calling luck, and what you actually did. I read every reply.

TIME COMMITMENT: 50 minutes, inside your weekly 60-minute block you set up last week.

I have been building my Owned Life with beehiiv at the heart of my tech stack. It's easy to set up, use, and connect it to your favorite AI, like Claude.

Codie Sanchez, Colin & Samir, Joanna Stern, and Oliver Darcy are here too. They all built newsletters (and podcasts and communities and websites) on beehiiv.

Some came with massive followings. Others built theirs along the way. That’s the thing about beehiiv: with so many ways to earn and grow, the platform is ready for whatever you’re building next.

Get started for free.

Next up: Install 1, Name the One Skill—Wednesday, October 28. Start with what you circled on the left side of your battery list, and keep your weekly block on the calendar.

Stay human, friends.