Personal Leverage

The everyday person takes pride in the idea that a piece of writing is “theirs” when they are the one who physically writes it. And they shouldn’t.

As someone who has gone through the effort of writing and rewriting the same stories and insights and lessons and mistakes, manually, a thousand times in my chosen niche and topic (digital writing), I can tell you there is no nobility in repeating yourself. I shouldn’t have to be the one to rewrite the same story when I have already written that story ten times in ten different ways. And I sure as hell shouldn’t be the one to rewrite the same Commodity Content in my industry when I have already written a hundred different versions of that Commodity Content in slightly different groupings of words in slightly different orders. I should have a machine do the “repeating” for me, so that I can focus on writing the next net-new story, sharing the next net-new perspective, crystallizing the next net-new insight, further building my Personal Language Model and scaling my Digital Brain.

This is the higher-leverage, more creative work to be done.

But this is a painful paradigm shift for many, because it means divorcing effort from outcome, and activity from ownership. Just because you took the time to write it doesn’t mean you spent time writing the right thing (you didn’t add anything “new” to your Digital Brain); just because you had to “think” doesn’t mean you produced any net-new thinking; and just because you physically wrote the words with your hands doesn’t mean the majority of the words you wrote are yours—unique and associated with you and only you.

If you agree language is an open-source operating system for communication, and no one owns individual letters or Commodity groupings of words, then you should also agree it is inefficient and unnecessary for you to write anything that is not contributing to the cumulative and compounding value of your Digital Brain.

• Chosen Commodity Content: Of all the Commodity Ideas in your chosen industry, niche, or topic, which ones do you want to be associated with the most? Which ones do you believe are important to repeat? Commodity Content is infinite, which means the unique component is to decide which ideas you want attached to your identity. So if you’re going to write Commodity Content of any kind, meaning you are going to take the time to “add it to your Digital Brain,” the purpose of writing and re-writing Commodity Content should be to “train your brain” on your chosen ideas and identity. A simple example would be: “If you want to save money, skip buying your morning coffee” vs “Skipping buying your morning coffee might save you a few dollars, but won’t make you rich.” Both of these are Commodity Ideas in the world of personal finance, but hold two completely different points of view. So, which one do you agree with? Which one is a reflection of your identity and how you see the world? That is the value of writing, rewriting, and choosing the Commodity Content inside your Digital Brain.
• Personality Content: Anything that is specific to you and your individual life experience is a non-commodity variable—which means it holds increased value and differentiation. The more Personality Content you write, the more Personality Variables exist within your Digital Brain, the more of “you” can be scaled and shared in the digital world. The cumulative value of all these Personality Variables is the creation of your Personal Language Model, which is how you build differentiated leverage in the AI age of infinite text-based Commodity Content.
• Original Content: You cannot learn how to create truly Original Content by being a tourist of many topics. You can only discover, and ultimately share differentiated, unique, and “owned” ideas through a deep commitment to thinking, and then crystallizing that thinking by writing, in a small number of niches over a prolonged period of time. Those who do are rewarded disproportionally. They become “thought leaders” of their respective topic(s), capturing the most and most lucrative opportunities.

In the age of AI, your goal is to spend the least amount of time writing Commodity Content, and the majority of your time writing Personality Content, so that one day (after many years of thinking deeply and writing obsessively about a small number of topics) you might produce some truly Original Content—thoughts that haven’t been thought before.

That’s not to say you can’t, or shouldn’t write Commodity Content. I do all the time. There is value in repeating Commodity Ideas in your chosen niche for categorical association (becoming known for a niche you own); there is value in reminding readers of Commodity Ideas (particularly beginners); and there is value in writing and re-writing Commodity Ideas yourself for your own learning, and to build your Personal Language Model with many different variations of how you write and speak about these Commodity Ideas.

But at a certain point, you will cross a threshold of diminishing returns.

Each net-new, slightly different variation of the same Commodity Content will produce incremental learnings (you are no longer clarifying your thinking as you write, you are repeating things you have already thought about and know), and incremental leverage (you are not adding anything new to your Digital Brain). And since time is finite, your pride—being the one to manually type words you’ve already said in groupings nearly identical to the groupings in which you’ve already said them—throttles your creative potential.

When people say AI will unleash a wave of abundance in society, across every industry, I believe this is the hope: that we will forgo the pride we have as humans to “do everything ourselves,” and more closely examine what is worth doing in the first place.

And in the case of writing, Commodity Content past a certain point is not worth writing yourself.

Because it was never really yours to begin with.