#096 – The Process & Email Writing

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Let’s jump in.

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read time 3 minutes 

#096 at a Glance:

• Quote: Talking yourself into perpetual mediocrity.

• Podcast: Steven Bartlett x Gary Neville.

• Mental Model: ‘The Process’ by James Clear.

• Hack: How to use AI without losing your writing skills.

• Tweet: Watch what they do, not what they say...

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Podcast I listened to:

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett #170 – Gary Neville

Gary Neville is a broadcaster, serial business founder and owner, and a winner of every possible club football title in his 20 years playing for Manchester United – with 2 Champions League medals, 8 Premier League medals, 3 FA Cup medals, a Club World Cup medal, and 2 League cup medals.

In one of his most emotional and heartfelt interviews to date, Gary opens up about precisely what drove him and his similarly successful siblings on – his brother being the England-capped footballer Phil Neville, while his sister is the former Head Coach of England Netball, Tracey Neville – despite their very humble origins.

A legend of Manchester United and a former captain of the club, he goes into detail about precisely what made the team culture of the Sir Alex Ferguson years so strong, why it’s so sorely lacking now, his stellar business career after hanging up his boots, and why everything he does is for the city he grew up in and calls home.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

[Podcast Length: 1 hour 40 minutes]

Mental Model I’ve been thinking about:

‘The Process’ by James Clear 

"The Process:

1. Decide what you want to achieve.

2. Try different ways of achieving it until you find one that works for you.

3. Do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t.

4. Don’t stop doing it until it stops working.

5. Repeat.

It is both this simple and this hard."

(h/t – James Clear)

Hack I’ve been using:

How To Use AI to Write Your Emails Without Losing Your Writing Skills

One of my favourite use-cases for AI is its ability to beautifully write well-crafted emails in a way that makes my own writing feel far inferior in comparison.

This is the loop that usually tends to occur:

I get stuck writing an email and can’t seem to find the right wording/structure

↓

Copy and paste my draft email into ChatGPT with a super basic prompt

↓

Receive a communicative masterpiece in seconds and proceed to send off my email

↓

Feel inferior to the super computer and think about how long it will realistically take for robots to one day take over the world

Existential threats aside, the problem with this loop is that it replaces the most fundamental part of the writing process: the struggle.

The struggle encountered during the writing journey is undoubtedly the most important factor that contributes to improved writing in the future.

Re-reading sentences, changing the locations of punctuation, critiquing your syntax, re-phrasing questions, balancing the rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs…the list goes on.

All of this is lost when, after a mediocre attempt at drafting a 200-word email, ChatGPT takes the reigns and saves us the hassle of embarking on this workflow.

Now, many would argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“ChatGPT can do it quicker and better than I can, so why would I waste my time?”

Agreed, and I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t rinse AI of its benefits in both our personal and professional undertakings.

I’m with you.

BUT what I am saying is that an over-reliance on AI tends to eradicate an essential function of the writing process in a way that will inevitably deteriorate our ability to communicate over time.

THAT really bothers me.

So, recently, I’ve added an additional step to the collaborative Dimitri/AI email-writing system.

My new one now looks like this:

I get stuck writing an email and can’t seem to find the right wording/structure

↓

Copy and paste my draft email into ChatGPT with a super basic prompt

↓

Receive a communicative masterpiece in seconds and proceed to send off my email

↓

I go back into ChatGPT and ask it to coach me through all of the edits that it made to my original email, line by line, as if a teacher would to a student

↓

Feel inferior to the super computer and think about how long it will realistically take for robots to one day take over the world

I think this hack finds the happy medium between harnessing the efficiency and capabilities of ChatGPT without completely compromising my writing brain or sacrificing my outward email quality.

With the goal obviously being that the next time I start my initial draft when writing an email (and every draft after that), that I slowly get closer and closer to what an ‘optimal’ AI-written email would look like, incrementally minimising the need for ChatGPT’s input over time.

In other words: using the robots to become better, so to one day beat the robots.

Let me know how you go.

Tweet I liked:

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say…

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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