My 90-Day ChatGPT Experiment Bottomed Out at $12.43. Quitting Saved My Income.

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.

Read the rest “My 90-Day ChatGPT Experiment Bottomed Out at $12.43. Quitting Saved My Income.”

Eating the Loss

Eating the Loss

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”

The Case for Ordinary Proof (And Why AI Can’t Fake the Chair)

The short essay that started all of this is on Medium. The 3-minute version is on YouTube.

In 2026, the detail you’d cut is the detail that earns. Here’s why.

Why the smallest details in personal writing are doing the most work — and why most writers, including me until recently, have been ignoring them.

Read the rest “The Case for Ordinary Proof (And Why AI Can’t Fake the Chair)”

Via Negativa: The Ancient Mental Model That Cures Modern Distraction

The fastest way to improve a system isn’t adding the right thing. It’s removing the wrong one.

This is the core principle of via negativa — and it may be the most powerful mental model for focus and productivity that most people have never applied.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was forty days from bankruptcy.Read the rest “Via Negativa: The Ancient Mental Model That Cures Modern Distraction”