Hello Reader,

Each week, I share one insight, one prompt, and a short grounding practice to help you grow with AI in alignment, not overwhelm.

This is for conscious entrepreneurs who value substance over shortcuts.

AI Insight That Matters 💡

What Was Worth Keeping

In April, someone using a marketing plugin I'd built emailed to say it had started looping. I opened it up in Claude Code to fix the bug, and found that Anthropic had shipped a marketing plugin of their own while I wasn't looking. It did about 80% of what mine did, and much of it was better.

I'd spent two days building mine. At the top of my notes that morning, I wrote three options. Upgrade, kill, or revamp.

Going through it line by line, the 80% they'd absorbed was the textbook, the persuasion principles, and headline formulas you can find in any marketing textbook. What was left was the stuff I'd taught for years and never seen in a book. How I read an audience before I write a word for them, and what I refuse to put my name to, even when it would sell.

I realized what was left was the distilled gold that has helped my clients succeed. Thank you, Anthropic!

So I rebuilt it around that. It took a morning, and the new version is better than the one I spent two days on.

Since then I've asked one question of everything I build with AI. When the model gets better, does this thing get more valuable or less?

Anything built to do a job the platform will ship itself gets less valuable with every release. Prompt packs, saved templates, custom GPTs, plugins like mine. I call that building on sand now, and I still catch myself doing it.

Your own judgment goes the other way. What good work looks like to you, and what you'd never say. A better model reads more out of that with every release, for nothing. It was the only part of my build that got more valuable when the tools improved, and it was the part I'd put the least work into.

This is what I mean by human-first AI. You're the source, and a better tool amplifies more of you.

But Colin, I'm not building plugins.

Fair. You've still read an AI draft and thought, I wouldn't say that. What you knew in that moment, and why, is your 20%. It's worth more than anything you can download, and right now it lives in your head.

Go and find the last correction you made to an AI draft. Write down what was wrong with it, and the reason. That's the start of the brief below, and it's the one part of your setup that won't need rebuilding when the next AI version comes out.

“ The better the tools get, the more your own judgment is worth. — Colin Scotland

AI Prompt That Works ✨

Turn Your Corrections Into a Brief

Pick one task you hand to AI and end up correcting every time. A client email, a workshop invitation, a session outline, a proposal. Run this in Claude or ChatGPT. It interviews you about what you'd accept and what you'd reject, writes a one-page brief in your own words, then tries the brief on a live task so you can see whether it took.

The Prompt:

Save the brief next to the work it belongs to and hand it over with that task from now on. If you find yourself making the same correction again next week, edit the brief and add an example. An example usually does more than another rule. For bonus points you could also ask Claude or ChatGPT to turn this into a skill so you can use it anytime.

Grounding Practice ☯

A Few Minutes Outside

Take a short walk with nothing playing in your ears. Go at a pace where you can feel each foot meet the ground.

For the first minute, listen. You don't need to name what you hear. Let the sounds arrive and pass while you keep walking.

Then let your attention widen. The air on your face. Something moving at the edge of your sight. Your breathing, without changing it.

When a thought about work turns up, you don't have to finish it. Notice the next step instead.

A few minutes is enough. There's nothing to bring back and nothing to write down.

Personal Note ❤️‍🔥

This letter skipped two Fridays while I was away. Coming back, I’ve been looking at how people are finding my work.

One encouraging discovery: my article about using Obsidian as a second brain received more than twice as many views in the last 90 days as in the previous 90.

Google traffic overall is down which isn't surprising "Googling" is fast becoming "ChatGPTing or Clauding". Looking at individual articles gave me something useful to work with: growing interest in a subject I use every day and enjoy teaching.

There are also lots of new visits arriving through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Small numbers so far, and something I’m curious to understand better and cultivate. This relatively new arena of AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. Optimizing content for AI, not just Google Search (the old SEO).

This week I’ve been improving existing articles and publishing a new guide to AI for coaches. The interest in Obsidian gives me another reason to keep developing what I share about it.

That’s where Epictetus’s words feel useful. How people search will keep changing. Answering their questions clearly is something I can keep getting better at. And you can too.

If you run a business, ask a few recent clients how they found you and what caught their attention. Their answers might give you a useful starting point for what to write or share next.

Which makes me curious: how did you first find me? An article, a recommendation, video, a keynote?

Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to hear.

🎬 Go Deeper

When you don’t tell an AI what you know, it fills the gap with something plausible. This is the companion piece to this week’s message, on what happens to the parts of the job you never wrote down.

Read: Whatever You Leave Out, the AI Will Fill In​

On YouTube

Step-by-step walkthroughs and tactical implementation for conscious AI integration.

Thanks for being here. If this resonates, share it with someone who would benefit from hearing this.

Reply and let me know what landed. 🙏

Colin

P.S. Cohort 2 of the 12-month AI Accelerator at Humane Business starts Thursday October 1. Up to five people from your business, building your own AI systems with us alongside you for the year. Details at humanebusiness.ai/accelerator.