Coaches and creators; AI copyright kerfuffle; copyediting tool foibles: Newsletter 14 May 2025
Newsletter 94. Never trust a coach who wants credit for your hard work. Plus training on copyrighted content is not fair use, standing out from 2.6 million books, three people to follow and three books to read.
Coaches don’t take credit
About a week ago my lower back went out. What that meant was that everything from walking to climbing stairs to sleeping was painful and difficult.
I have five decades experience with this problem, so I knew (1) it was a muscular problem, not a joint or disc problem, and (2) it could easily take many weeks to resolve itself. My personal trainer Alex asked me to come in on our regular day despite being barely able to walk and guided me through some gentle stretching and breathing exercises, which I also repeated later at home, along with the usual painkillers and cold and heat treatments.
And a wonderful thing happened. Two days later I was fine.
At my next training session, Alex saw how much better I was moving and said, “I did that. I fixed you.”
As grateful as I was for his help, that annoyed me. He gave me some good advice. But I followed his instructions, I suffered the pain, I did the work, and I achieved the recovery. The other things I also did, like months of exercises before this to improve my core strength and changes in the ergonomics of how I sit, work, drive, lift, and sleep, probably contributed to the quicker recovery. Alex’s comment was basically inviting me to resent him for helping me.
I bring this up because it’s central to how coaching works. I know this from coaching authors as an advisor, editor, and ghostwriter, but it applies to all coaches and managers everywhere.
Never take credit for the work others do.
People who create deserve to be in the foreground. A writer who writes a book did the work of creating those ideas, doing the research to support them, structuring those concepts, and writing those words. That’s true even if that success could never have been achieved without the help of the coach.
When Jalen Brunson takes control of a basketball game and his team charges back from a 20-point deficit to win, he rightly deserves the credit, even if Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau’s guidance and work with him are what got him and his team in a position to succeed.
I recently worked for months with an author who fervently wanted a publishing deal with a major publisher. I coached her on how to write her proposal, how to highlight her ideas, how to structure her sample chapter, and how to position and describe her marketing resources. I introduced her to the publisher that ended up making the deal with her, and she was effusive in her thanks for my efforts.
But it was her idea, her interviews, her qualifications, her writing, and her personal energy that got that contract, not mine. If everybody knows about her and nobody knows about me, I call that a huge success.
This isn’t just about being generous about credit. It’s not even about doing what’s morally right. It’s about motivation.
When you coach somebody, they must feel ownership of their own creations. That’s where the energy, drive, and creativity comes from. That’s what the coach is trying to ignite.
So sure, feel free to thank me and whoever is coaching you. But coaches should never try to take the credit. Because in the end, it’s the innovative people the coach works with that are the true engine of all creativity.
News for writers and others who think
The U.S. Copyright Office released the pre-publication version of Part 3 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence. It takes a carefully reasoned and analytical approach and concludes, “making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.” This decision would undermine most of the current AI models until there is some sort of licensing approach. Probably not coincidentally, the Trump Administration fired the head of the copyright office days later. (Consider that the valuations of companies controlled by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook all depend on the value of their AI tools.)
Are there too many books? In its newsletter, Gotham Ghostwriters says to ignore the 2.6 million books published each year and concentrate on your book’s quality, your authority, and the community you build around it. If you do that right, your competition is a few thousand books worth writing and reading, not the flood of millions of crappy books.
On Jane Friedman‘s blog, Ariane Peveto publishes a detailed analysis of competing, and mostly AI-fueled, copyediting tools including Hemingway, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Autocrit. If you use such products, there are many lessons here, including how these automated copy editors sometimes have different priorities and values than the writer does. As this analysis points out, they tend to flatten prose and polish away the writer’s personality.
Amazon’s audiobook subsidiary Audible announced it will make AI tools available to publishers, including AI narrators and eventually, AI translation.
Three people to follow
Steve Rubel , executive with decades of insightful publicity and media experience
Jim Rutt, podcaster and counterintuitive thinker on politics, tech, and basically everything
Lindsey Coit, women’s leadership expert and connector in glorious Portland, Maine
Three books to read
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker (Basic Books, 2025). If you worry the techbros have gone too far, this is the book for you.
Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity by Eric Topol, MD (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Don’t put off reading this until it’s too late and you’re dead.
Designing Momentum: A Big Goal Blueprint for Transforming Everyday Moments Into Massive Success by Brant Menswar (Wiley, 2025). Become more effective by harnessing the power of good decisions in key moments.