This is a story about stoic self-mastery — and how an ancient Roman slave philosopher named Epictetus saved me from the most expensive email I never sent.
Prefer the tighter version? This essay first ran on Medium: I Almost Sent the £11,000 Email. There is also a short film of the idea if you would rather watch.
Right now, AI is making every freelancer look replaceable. The consultants surviving it stopped selling hours years ago. This is the exact three-stage path they took — and the 90-day roadmap to follow it. (Read it on Medium | Watch the full video breakdown on YouTube)
This is the story of how I learned to productize your expertise — the quiet, three-stage shift that changed everything: from guessing my way through every project, to a repeatable machine, to a product I could sell on Ko-fi while I slept.
I recognized the gesture immediately. I’d been making it myself for over a year.
The reach is always first now. We just stopped noticing it was a choice—or counting the cognitive tax we pay every time we make it.
My 90-Day ChatGPT Experiment ended in disappointment. The dashboard didn’t just report a loss; it reported a failure of soul.
$12.43.
That was the total payout for seven days of “peak productivity.” Seven articles, 12,000 words, zero typos, and enough SEO keywords to choke a search engine. I had spent three months building a “content machine” that was technically perfect and fundamentally unreadable.
The fifth untaught skill, and the first one that isn’t about your own judgment at all. It’s about what you’ll absorb on behalf of someone else. In a workplace where software has made blame precise, instant, and free, the rarest thing a human can do is stand between that precision and the people it would otherwise grind down.… Read the rest “Eating the Loss”
