The one skill

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

Your results will personalize this entire learning path.

Welcome to Install 1, Name the One Skill, of Learning Path 6: Human First AI Fluency. Today you'll pick the one skill you'll build over the next 90 days and place it honestly on the Craft Continuum. It takes one 50-minute session.

Last week, an experienced enterprise seller I coach walked me through a service review he and his sales engineer just ran with a customer (they sell cybersecurity solutions). He'd had the account for about 90 days, and it was his first time meeting their team in person.

The deck followed the format his company had used for years: customer data and the product roadmap. It ballooned to "literally hundreds of slides." Customers usually get value from them. "But we've been doing the same thing for years," he said, and these days it doesn't drive pipeline the way it used to.

So he added a couple of his own slides. On one, he summarized what the customer had told him over the last 90 days. "Here are the five things that you've been telling me about," he told them, then walked through why each one mattered and where it stood.

"I think we spent like an hour and 10 minutes just on this slide." The meeting was 90 minutes. "We spent the time talking about them, not us." Before it ended, the customer agreed to a proof of concept and to revisit a second opportunity in February.

Now he's writing a short document (using Nate Nasralla’s one-page business case) that a key leader can put his name on and present to the CEO. Claude had already drafted a version for him, and it was decent. But "I wanted to do it out of my own brain," he said.

Earlier in the call, I'd told him why the work has to start with him: "You're going to need to understand it, you're going to need to defend it, and you're going to need to answer questions when they come up in person. The AI won’t be able to do that for you in the room. But over time, once you build it, that’s where the AI will help you to move faster at scale with the rest of your accounts."

That’s why this work is important. He had a strong year last year, but he needs a more purposeful system so he doesn’t have to grind it out as he did. This creates more of what he calls “life force,” freeing him to do what matters most.

As I’ve been preaching for months, this is the Human First, Professional Second, AI Third approach in action. Start with you, then move to AI.

He's going deep on writing executive-level narrative documents that sell for him when he’s not in the room. They read like a customer’s internal business case, not a vendor’s proposal. "That's gonna be my focus," he said.

I help members measure their progress using what I call the Craft Continuum. It lays one skill across five positions:

A skill is a single move you can pull off once. A capability is that same move, repeated so many times and at such a high standard that you can summon it on demand, under pressure, again and again. Over the next 90 days, you'll take one skill and turn it into a capability—using human power to define it, paying the professional “tax” to own it, and then using AI to amplify it.

For a seller, that skill might be anything from developing strategic account plans to building a creative contact marketing strategy to writing a narrative business case like the one he's writing. If you're not in sales, think project plans, interviewing for a new job, or pitching a new product.

Pick the one that would make the rest of your work easier if you moved it a single position to the right. Then place it where it is today. If you land on Deficient, that's simply an honest assessment of your current state in one area—no need to judge it or be hard on yourself.

→ Human: 10 minutes, no screen. Start with what you circled on the left side of your battery list from the primer. (No list created yet? Take two minutes and write down what lifts your battery at work.) Write down up to three skills from that side you'd like to improve. Next to each one, write a piece of work due in the next 90 days where it would add value. Circle or highlight the one that would make the rest of your work easier if you moved it one position to the right.

→ Professional: 20 minutes. Pay “the tax”: fill out the skill card in your words, before any AI. You can do it by hand or by voice using Wispr Flow. Where is it on the Craft Continuum today, and what recent piece of work proves it? What would one position to the right look like, in simple words? Which piece of work will you practice in the next 90 days? It can be messy, as long as every word is yours. (See mine below for an example.)

→ AI: 15 minutes. This time, AI asks the questions. Open a new chat in whatever AI you use (or your company allows). Type in or upload a photo of your notes, leaving out customer names and anything your company wouldn't want shared. Then paste this prompt:

→ Back to you: 5 minutes. Read the card out loud and cross out or remove anything that doesn't sound like you. If the interview changed your mind about the skill or your position, change it now. Save the card next to page one. That's page two of your library. (Skipped the primer? Save it somewhere you own, like a personal drive, not your work laptop. It becomes page one of your library.)

For mine, I want to build a capable AI twin that loses none of my human authenticity. It is designed to monetize my knowledge, experience, and frameworks by being available on demand and embedded within workflows for members of The Purposeful Performer.

So I expected my skill to be “designing human-first AI systems.”

But when I went through this exercise, one skill stood out to develop, or at the very least work through, before I get to this: writing. Specifically, “writing with an editor’s eye,” because it makes all the other skills easier to implement once my book’s manuscript is further along on the Craft Continuum.

I ranked it as “Deficient,” not so much because I am bad at writing (well, you can be the judge of that), but because I am simply behind on this skill for a very valuable project (my book) that has a fast-approaching timeline (need to return it to my publisher by December 11th).

Building my AI twin will come, but the book comes first.

I’ve already fed my AI twin all my essays and LinkedIn posts since 2016, but to train it to work like me (and help you work better), I am starting small: feeding it the library I am building in this learning path. Then, once I have that lesson-based template, I can update the other learning paths so the AI twin can help members implement the work inside their workflows (think of enhancing things together in real-time where you do your work, like organizing your calendar, building presentations, preparing for an interview or meeting, editing a business case, building your personal brand on LinkedIn, or organizing your finances).

How I made this lesson: I pulled the human part from last week's coaching call and my book. Claude organized it, and I went in and wrote or adjusted every line.

Hit reply (or comment below if you're reading on the web) with one sentence: your one skill and where you placed it today. I read every reply.

TIME COMMITMENT: 50 minutes, inside your weekly 60-minute block.

Next up: Install 2, Write How You Do It. You'll write down how you do your skill, step by step, and add your best past work to your library.

Stay human, friends.