You can ride a long way with a burr under your saddle.
You just can’t enjoy the ride.
That’s where most folks are with the AI right now. It works. It’s useful. Nobody’s giving it up.
And every single time you talk to it, something rubs.
Here’s the one that rubs the worst. See if you’ve been here.
It’s a Tuesday night. You’ve got two contractors’ bids sitting on the kitchen table and you’ve been staring at them for an hour.
One’s cheaper. One’s got better reviews. You’re tired. You’ve read both of them twice and they’ve started to look the same.
So you type the whole thing out. Both bids, both numbers, the timeline, the whole mess. Takes you ten minutes to lay it out properly.
And you ask the machine one question.
Which one should I go with?
And here’s what comes back.
A list.
Option A, with a tidy paragraph underneath. Strengths on this side. Considerations on that side. Option B, same treatment. Maybe an Option C you never even mentioned.
Then, at the bottom, the line that does all the damage.
“It depends on your priorities.”
Well, sure it does. That’s why you asked.
You spent ten minutes typing. You’re right back where you started, except now you’ve got four more paragraphs to read.
You close the laptop. You go to bed still not knowing. And somewhere in the back of your head a little voice says, what exactly was that for.
Now let me tell you what actually happened there. Because it isn’t what most people think.
It wasn’t being careful with you.
Careful would be useful. Careful is a man who tells you the answer and then tells you where it might go wrong. Careful still gives you the answer.
What the machine did was avoid being wrong.
Those are two different animals, and the difference is the whole thing.
A recommendation can be checked. If it says go with the cheaper man and the cheaper man cracks your driveway, you know who was wrong.
A list can’t be checked. A list is right no matter what happens, because it never actually said anything.
So it hands you the list. Looks thorough. Sounds balanced. Did nothing.
It handed the work back to you.
You came in with one job — decide. You left with the same job, plus homework.
I worked around men who knew things. If you asked a foreman which beam went in, he did not read you the catalog.
He said, that one. Here’s why. If the load changes, we’ll talk again.
That’s an answer. It’s got his name on it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong on him, and he knew that when he opened his mouth.
That’s what makes it worth something. Not that he was always right. That he was willing to be wrong out loud.
The machine won’t put its name on anything. So you get the catalog.
Now. Here’s how you stop it, and it costs you nothing.
You tell it up front, in plain words:
Give me one recommendation, not a list. Tell me why. Then tell me what would change your mind.
That’s the whole fix. One sentence, said before you ask.
Three small demands, and each one is doing a job.
One recommendation takes the catalog off the table. It has to pick something. It can’t hide in the middle anymore.
Tell me why keeps it honest. A pick with no reasoning behind it is a coin flip wearing a suit, and you will spot that the second the reasoning has to be written down where you can read it.
What would change your mind is the one most people leave off. It’s the best of the three.
It makes the machine show you where its own answer is soft. You find out what it isn’t sure about without having to go digging for it.
Take those two bids back out tomorrow and try it. Not a special question. The ordinary one you were going to ask anyway.
Couple things you’ll notice.
The answer gets shorter. That surprises people. You’d think demanding more would get you more words. You get fewer, because the padding was never for you in the first place.
And you can argue with it now.
You can’t argue with a list. There’s nothing there to push against. But you can argue with a pick. You can say, you’re wrong about the timeline, here’s why, and watch it actually respond to you.
Once you can argue with it, you’re running the conversation again. Which is where you belonged from the start.
That’s one habit. Small thing. Takes you ten seconds.
There are a couple dozen more like it. All the same kind of thing — little corrections that get the machine to talk to you like a person instead of a brochure.
I wrote them down and put them in a file. Two pages, plain language, free, sitting at the bottom of this page. No sign-up. No email. Nothing wanted from you.
Take it or leave it. And cut any rule in it that doesn’t suit the way you work.
But you don’t need the file for the one above.
Ask your question. Say one recommendation, why, and what would change your mind.
Then watch that burr come out from under the saddle.
You will see clearly now
Both files here free!
How-To-Use-The-Working-Manner-LayerDownload
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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