Here’s what I learned about communicating knowledge from my work as an analyst . Your job as an analyst looks like this: Let’s talk about the last part. How to communicate insights A leader who needs to make a decision asks your opinion. (In the analyst world, this is called an “inquiry.”) Here’s what you…
I did it again. I joined a collaborative writing project in a controversial space with a bunch of volunteer collaborators who are also writers and editors. It’s sort of like having a colonoscopy with a whole bunch of other people looking on, critiquing what they see, and making “helpful” suggestions. Ew. What was I thinking?…
Newsletter 139. What does it mean to be an author in the age of AI and instant publishing? Plus, the Cleveland Plain Dealer uses AI to write articles, AI detectors are a joke, three people to follow, three books to read, and one bot with infinite answers. What is an author? I wanted to be…
For years, people have talked about justifying writing a book as an “oversized business card.” This is a dumb idea. If you write a book like this quickly, don’t invest in editing or cover design, and self-publish it, it does indeed tell people something about you. While people in general don’t know much about books,…
It’s natural to use technology tools to make writing more efficient. Nobody is suggesting going back to typewriters and Wite-Out or looking up spellings in a paper dictionary. But now that we have AI, it’s tempting to outsource large amounts of the work in nonfiction writing to AI tools. This is a mistake for several…
We live in a world where I tend to view anyone who approaches me with compliments skeptically. All too often, what follows “I think you were great” is some sort of spammy appeal to get something from me or get me to buy something. It’s a horrifying world that we live in where even something…
I’ve just reviewed my freelance business for 2025 and 2026. I’ve reached a milestone. Every dollar I made came from prior relationships. None of it came from outbound marketing or cold leads. Here’s where my clients came from. I do no outbound email marketing and no advertising. I do effectively no public speaking. I buy…
Newsletter 135. Companies (and Super Bowl coaches) behave rationally, even when it seems otherwise. Plus, how to write a romance novel in an hour, a terrifying prediction about AI job loss, three people to follow, three books to read, and one bot to rule them all. Rational actors, Super Bowl edition People are irrational. Organizations…
I was recently hired to write a book based on the ideas of a couple of thought leaders who’d built a fair-sized consulting company. My job of gathering source material started with interviewing their colleagues about the idea frameworks that they used in their practices. During one of these interviews, I had a very odd…