The more you make, the less you matter
ARE YOU SELLING WHAT AI MAKES FOR FREE?
I’ve worked with a client who writes for a living for twenty years. They came to a call with the new copy for their LinkedIn page that explains who they are and why you’d hire them rather than a chatbot.
They’d made it in five minutes with AI after much back-and-forth, and they hadn’t edited it yet.
It read fine, but it also said nothing, and they knew it before I did, because the thing they are good at, the thing people pay her for, is hearing when writing is empty, soulless.
They had used the machine to write the argument for why you should hire her over the machine. And guess what? It came out flat…
Something changed in how we work, and it was damn fast.
A year ago, making that copy would have cost them a morning. The blank page, the false starts, the anxiety and frustration. Today it costs five minutes and one button.
The making of things, the output, got fast and cheap almost overnight. And that’s a problem for you.
The thinking behind it did not change at all. Knowing which sentence is alive and which is dead, knowing when to be bold instead of safe, that is exactly as hard as it always was. The machine can’t do it and decide on it.
And because the output is now so fast, we have started handing the thinking over too, without ever deciding to. We pick the AI’s brain, we second-guess ourselves, and it feels efficient. Is it really though?
So this client ended the week having produced more than ever, and feeling more replaceable than ever. Both true at once. And we all feel that strange new feeling we can’t quite name.
And if you sell judgment instead of output, as a strategist or a coach, and you are sure this is a maker’s problem, give it a year. The machine is reaching for the thinking too, slowly, but surely.
But the thinking is still yours. It is the one thing the machine cannot copy, and the one thing that was ever really yours to sell. The output was always going to get cheap, but the judgment behind it is where your worth actually lives now.
And it reaches further than how you feel; it reaches what you sell. If the output is the thing you charge for, you are now charging for something your client can make in five minutes without you. For free.
The dread you feel watching AI do your work in ten seconds is not a sign you are finished, but it is a sign it is time to rethink what you sell. The machine now does the easy half of your job, and clients are getting stingy about it.
If you have been selling output and giving your judgment for free, things have to change, and you should stop giving it away. That’s what you start selling.
Before you close this, do one thing. Look back at your last working week and split it in two:
The hours where you actually decided something, said the hard thing.
And the hours where you just created output.
What’s the ratio of what you charge for? Most of us don’t like the ratio.
Working out how to win those hours back, and rebuild what you sell around them, is hard to do alone with the tool right there offering to make you more.
That is what the free 45-minute call is for. Book it for free now:
