I have a lot of analogies for using AI to do the work for you. Perhaps my best one is saying you used AI to write your book is like saying you used a car to run your marathon. Technically, you covered the distance, but you really didn’t do anything all that impressive. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because solopreneurs are letting AI do more work for them to free up their time, but they’re not thinking about the work that’s worth keeping. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Streamlined Solopreneur. The show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off, worry-free. I’m your host, Joe Casabona.

And here’s the problem. When we let AI do the heavy lifting for us, we become weak. Our muscles atrophy. And when we let AI come up with ideas for us or write the first draft for us, it’s even worse than that. We’re removing an important part of what makes our work uniquely us, which is to say we’re removing ourselves from the work.

And what’s left is the average of the project that we trained the large language model on, combined with the rest of the large language models training on everything. And it’s not your original idea. And this is a problem, because if we are not doing critical thinking through writing, then we start to lose our critical thinking skills.

But more than that, what we’re signaling to people is, I am completely replaceable. I don’t need to do this work myself. The AI can do the work for me. And in that case, if you can’t be bothered to do the actual work, then why should they hire you? Maybe they just train the AI on everything you’ve written, just like you’ve done to remove yourself from the equation completely.

But the problem actually goes deeper than that, right? We’re not just letting AI replace us for the sake of replacing us, or at least most of us aren’t. We’re using AI to save time because we feel too busy. And so the fix I want to talk about is how to make the creative process faster, but also what do you do to create the time and space in your business to actually do the creative stuff? So you don’t feel like you need to use AI to do that work, the most important work.

Because here’s the real deal. I’m a fan of Christopher Walken, and everybody has a Christopher Walken impression. They kind of talk like this, a little raspy, and the cadence is the thing that lets people know that you are doing a Christopher Walken impression. And some are really good. Jay Morris is really good. Bradley Cooper’s shockingly good. Some are really bad, like mine, and some sound like their impression is based on someone else’s impression.

The reason I’m talking about this is because this is the risk of what happens when AI does the writing for us. Because no matter how good Jay Moore’s impression of Christopher Walken is, no matter how good Dana Carvey’s impression of George H.W. Bush is, they are not Christopher Walken or George H.W. Bush. They are a facsimile of those people.

When AI writes for us, it is not us. It is a lesser facsimile of us. And when we use it to do the creative work, the thought leader work, the important work, what we’re signaling to people is a lesser facsimile of me is good enough.

So what’s the fix? I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the writing here because I think this is so important. I mentioned critical thinking through writing.
The truth is, the first draft is where the magic happens. It not only allows you to control what is said and how it’s said, but it forces us to think about the problem and our approach to solving the problem. It’s critical thinking through writing, which is why we should always make time to write the first draft, because then we know for sure that it is something that we thought of, that we have organized in a way that we think is best for our audience.

And you might be saying, Joe, I’m a bad writer. AI is a better writer than me. And I would strongly challenge that. AI might know grammar and structure better than you, but it is not better at writing prose than you are, because it’s just taking a statistical average of all of its training. It is a word calculator. It is not writing anything interesting, compelling, or unique. That is where we as human beings come in. What you are signaling to your audience, your customers, your clients, is that a lesser facsimile is good enough. I couldn’t be bothered to spend two hours thinking about this, but you should be bothered to spend a few minutes reading it. So that’s the reason why we need the fix.

But again, that’s not really fixing the problem. The problem is that solopreneurs feel like they don’t have enough time to write, to do this, this part. So how do we make time for that? Or at least, how do we speed up the process?

So there are a few ways where you can speed up the creative process, the writing process, or whatever creative work you’re doing. The first is to have a good idea capture system in place so that you’re never starting with a blank screen.

Again, you want to come up with the ideas. The ideas should be yours. Otherwise, you’re just getting the average of a bunch of ideas, and those ideas will be average. So you want to come up with ideas. And the best way to do that is to have a good idea capture system. I always have a notebook with me, but I also use voice capture on my phone to record an idea that will get sent to Obsidian. And each week I can sit at my computer and look in my ideas folder, it’s my drafts folder, and say, ” That’s what I’m going to write about today”.

I’m never starting from a blank slate, which means I’m not spending mental energy on that first hurdle, which is what should I talk about? Because that could take the longest and it could take a ton of mental energy and it makes the process longer. So that’s the first way to shorten up this process.

The second is to let AI do the editing, the proofreading, the feedback, the red teaming. You might think that I’m super anti AI and I’m really just anti AI replacing what humans should be doing. I’m anti using AI to replace me without thinking about what it’s actually replacing.

So I will spend a couple of hours writing a first draft. I want the first draft to be good. I want to think through a problem and then I will take it and I will give it to a Claude project. And that Claude project is very specific. I wanted to check for spelling, grammar, clarity, conciseness. Does the ending reinforce my overall point? Do I finish strong? That is the weakest part of my game. I open with a great story, I make a good point, and then I’m just like, and now I’m done. So that’s a legitimate place where AI can help me. Plus grammar and spelling. And, and I will also say, like, do I ramble?

But the second part of that project is I say I’m a better writer than you. I don’t want you to make full on rewrite recommendations and I don’t want you to rewrite what I’ve written. I want a bulleted list of suggestions, and then I take that list and I apply the suggestions I think are good.
Because what I’ve noticed is AI will suck out the personality. Even if I’ve trained it on my writing, it knows my writing pretty well now. And it’ll still say things like you have in the parenthetical the word natch, which I think is short for naturally. But this informal tone might not be good for your audience of busy solopreneurs. It adds my personality. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for me to do. So I am looking at everything it’s recommending and applying only what I think it should be.

And I and then I’ll give it feedback. I’ll say, this is why I’m keeping these things. And of course AI wants to appease us. And so it says, oh, you’re absolutely right. So that that part speeds up the process for me as well.

And then the last part is to have a VA or even Claude Cowork can do this. Have it publish for you. Take the text and send it to your WordPress site or substack or whatever. Again, my VA will do this. My VA will publish my newsletter and then publish it as an article on my WordPress site and then take the LinkedIn version of it and post it on LinkedIn. That’s removing the tedious part for you so that you are freeing up some time.

The other way to free up some time is to actually look at your calendar. How you’re spending your time, the tasks that you say you’re going to do versus the tasks you actually do, and the tools you end up fighting. So that you can optimize your schedule and block off time for writing or creative work. So that you can remove the tasks that you don’t need to do from your list, either just completely or by automating or delegating. And by finding the right tools to actually help you do the job better without adding subscription bloat.

So that’s how you create that. If you want to walk through my process for how to do that, head over to streamlined.fm/sweep and it will give you the full process for what I’m calling The Solopreneur Sweep. You do a sweep through your business to understand those three things so you can create time and space in your business.

So those are the fixes. I implore you. Do the creative work yourself. Write the first draft. Because if you’re not willing to think about the problems you’re trying to solve, then you are not worth hiring. And I know you know that’s not true, and you know I know that’s not true, but that’s the signal you’re sending to somebody who doesn’t know you.

I want to end with a couple of some recommended listening and reading.

The first is a recent episode of the show called Three Lessons Solopreneurs Should Take from the Olympics. It’s episode 522 in your podcast player. It’ll be in the show Notes. I also have a long-form article called ” The First Draft is where the magic happens”. I have an article called the Three-Question Test for Using AI Effectively. We started at the beginning with People are using AI, but they’re not thinking about why they’re using AI or the goals they have for the use of AI. I lay out three questions in this article for how you can assess if AI is actually helping you.

And then finally, I was on Insider Secrets to a Top 100 podcast with my friend Courtney Elmer. This is a two-parter episode. The first part is called ” Is AI making your podcast easier to skip”? We get philosophical here, and then I provide some of the solutions that I covered here and some more. Courtney’s insight, of course, is amazing. So those will all be in the show notes and over at streamlined.fm. But that’s it for this episode.
Again, if you want to create the time and space in your business so that you can spend time writing and critically thinking about the problem that you solve and actually doing the important work, head over to streamlined.fm/sweep to get The Solopreneur Sweep.

Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.