My coaching client, Laura, recently told me that she saved more money than she spent on my coaching because I helped her simplify and consolidate her tech stack. And now I want to do the same thing for you, too. I have put out a free tool called the Tools Audit. It will help you determine what tools you use, how much you're paying, and where you can consolidate and eliminate to simplify what your small business tech stack. You can go to streamlined.fm/tools to get your free tools audit today. That's streamlined.fm/tools.
Michelangelo is getting ready to paint the Sistine Chapel he'd rather be sculpting and is struggling to come up with an approach to this massive undertaking. Shakespeare is writing Romeo and Juliet, but he's stuck on the part where Romeo visits Juliet at the window. Did you know that in the original draft, it was a window and not a balcony? He has no idea what Romeo should say.
Marie Curie is working hard in her lab. She's discovered higher-than-expected levels of radiation in ore, but she's not sure what's causing them. None of these people used AI to assist them in their work, work that persists for hundreds of years.
I went to PodFest earlier this year, and I delivered an increasingly important message. Don't let AI do the work that you should be doing now. There was an entire two-day track dedicated to AI, and as you can imagine, I was one of the only people to talk about the perils of AI and not the benefits.
A chorus I keep hearing over and over again is that you have to use AI, or you will fall behind. In fact, one of the talks that was supposed to happen, as far as I know, ended up not happening was a talk called AI or Die, where it said you will get left behind if you don't use it. That is not true. Most of the people who are telling you that stand to make money off of people using AI. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Streamlined Solopreneur, the podcast that helps you grow without burnout and put systems in place so you can take time off of your business without feeling guilty or stressed. One of the gateways into systems like this is AI. People say, oh, AI is great. I get it to sound like me. And then it does the work for me.
The problem is that it doesn't sound like you, and it doesn't do work nearly as well as you could do it. And I'm sorry, but if you believe that, then you do not care about the quality of your work. Getting back to what I was saying about using AI or getting left behind, here's something about all of those people I mentioned.
Humanity's greatest works were created almost exclusively before the advent of computers, let alone AI. Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Marie Curie could attest to that. So could Beethoven, Ben Franklin, Jefferson and Madison, Ada Lovelace, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, and countless other people who created long-lasting, amazing work without the help of AI.
What all of these people had was not a glorified word association machine, which is what AI is. When people say AI, what they really mean today in 2026 is large language models. And what large language models are, are basically math-based word associations. It's not thinking; there's no personality. It's been programmed to do a very specific thing.
No, these people did not have a glorified word association machine. What they had was time and space to really think about their craft, to really think about the problem they're trying to solve. That's what we all need in order to not fall behind. We need it way more than AI or large language models. We need to make time in our schedules to create, to think more, to go beyond the first idea without asking AI to do it for us. And we create time and space by using the tools we have at our disposal.
Now, you might think what I'm saying is don't use AI. And that's not the case. We just need to remember that AI is not the creator, it's not the thinker, it's not the originator. AI is a tool for us to use. I don't use it for first drafts or shallow ideas, or even as an early “thinking buddy”. I want all of that to come from me so that my ideas are not influenced by AI.
Instead, I'll use AI for crunching a lot of data and finding patterns in source material. I'll use it for doing some research. And that usually means surfacing primary sources for me to review. I'll use it for red teaming or finding holes in my deeper ideas or outlines. I will only use red teaming or AI for red teaming on ideas and thoughts once I have poked all of the holes I can think of in it, and I'll give an example in a second.
But I'll also use it for proofreading my work. I have really specific prompts around how it should review my work, including a directive to not rewrite anything and to give extensive reasoning behind why it's telling me to make all of those changes. And each of these things saves me appreciable time and gives me the space to create good work.
So, let's kind of dig deeper into some of the things I've said here, right? And the first is I want my ideas to come from me so that they're not influenced by AI, or I want everything to come from me. I don't want to, for example, spend five minutes thinking about something and then saying, hey, here's what I'm thinking. Give me 10 episode ideas, or here's what I'm thinking. What do you think? No, I want to spend 20 to 30 minutes thinking about something and really diving into the issue, really marinating in the issue, before I even consider sending it to AI. If I do send it to AI for red teaming, I don't do that for everything. I'm confident in the things I think about. I know I'm an expert in my field, and I have my original thoughts.
Something that really stuck with me from an episode I did with Amanda Goetz was that she said she doesn't consume social media before she does any writing. So she will do all of her work first, and then she will go through and, you know, go do social media or whatever this is. This is episode 496, by the way. So streamlined.fm/496. You can listen to this whole episode.
But she said that she will not go on social media or read anything before she does her own writing. And it makes perfect sense, right? Because humans are highly influential beings. And if we let AI take our shallow thought and turn it into a deeper thought, it is no longer our thought. It is the average of our thoughts, which makes it an average thought. Just like, you know, I have an article over on streamlinedsolopreneur.com. streamlined.fm.
They're in the same place. I have an article called, the first draft is where the magic happens, where I basically argue that it's stupid to let AI write the first draft for you and then you fix it. Those are not your thoughts. Those are other people's thoughts coalesced into this average mush. But because you are starting from that average mush, you're not going to have a standout idea. Which is why I write my first drafts. I write the full article, and then again, my copy editor, Gem, I use Gemini. My copy editor, GEM doesn't say anything about rewriting it or suggesting ideas.
It just says, proofread this for grammar, spelling, and clarity. Do not rewrite it. Do not rewrite anything. Just tell me the changes to make, because I am a better writer than you. So we don't want AI influencing our thoughts, our writing. Why would you want to outsource the thing that makes you uniquely you?
Another way to think about it is like when you shallowly think of something and then outsource the rest to AI, you're not making your own ideas come to life. You're making other people's ideas come to life. So if you use AI sparingly, you won't get left behind. You will stand out, contrary to what the experts are telling you.
And this is for two reasons. You won't sound like everyone else, which is guaranteed to happen. If you use AI to create, you will sound like everybody else. And the other thing is that you'll actually show up for your audience, your customers, your clients, in a way that people who rely on AI will not. Because they don't care enough to create time and space in their day to actually help you solve the problems. They have decided that what AI does is good enough. And in a world where so many people are doing good enough, good enough is no longer good enough.
So if you want to stand out, don't use AI. This was the crux of my talk at PodFest 2026. And I ended that talk with a story about my daughter. Last year she had a goal. She's a Girl Scout. Girl Scout cookie season is like the most important time of year. And last year she had a goal of selling 600 Girl Scout cookies because she wanted the prize that came from with selling 600 boxes. That's a really big and audacious goal. And I told her that I wouldn't help her until she sold 300 on her own.
And when I said I wouldn't help her, what I meant was I wouldn't use my decently sized online platform, my audience, to try to sell Girl Scout cookies for her until she sold 300 on her own. I wanted her to actually do the work. And boy did she went out door to door every weekend in the winter in the Northeast, she worked cookie booths every weekend, standing in lobbies and outside of establishments selling cookies. When people saw her going door to door, they stopped their cars on the side of the road because it was so rare to actually see a Girl Scout going door to door anymore. And she ended up selling 640 boxes of cookies, more than double the next highest girl. Nearly everyone knows someone who's selling Girl Scout cookies.
Girl Scout cookies are a commodity. So how did she sell so many? Because instead of doing what most people and read most parents do, which is post a link on social media or leave a QR code out at work, she showed up and she stood out. And don't get me wrong. Once she hit 300, I shared it with my mailing list. I shared it with all my friends online. My wife, even before the 300, brought, I mean, she brought boxes of cookies to work. But this is what everyone else does. The differentiating factor was that my daughter went door to door every weekend in multiple neighborhoods at a time, where nobody else was doing that. And as a result, people took notice. This is how we should use AI. Not to create bland content that blends in with everyone else's, but to give us the time and the space to actually show up and stand out.
That's it for this episode of Streamlined Solopreneur. I hope you liked it. Let me know what you think. Do you feel that you need AI? Do you feel like we'll get left behind if we don't use it? You can write in or send a voice note over at streamlined.fm/feedback. Or I guess you could just go to streamlinedfeedback.com, that's why I bought that URL, streamlined/feedback.com. Let me know if you want to get more stuff like this. You can also join my mailing list over at streamlined.fm.
And finally, this year my daughter is motivated to sell 1,000 boxes because while she hit 640, there was someone who outsold her because their parents own a car dealership. And so she is very motivated to win this year. She's already started going door to door, and we did shoot a video for people whom we can't reach. So if you want cookies and you don't have a Girl Scout in your life, you can go to teresacasabona.com, that's theresacasabona.com. I'll have a link to that and everything else I talked about in the show notes.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.