Human Overriding Myself
And 6 ways to get more real
I have an embarrassing confession to make…
STORY
I almost sent you garbage last week.
Custom GPT open, half-formed thought, self-imposed deadline. I fed it my notes, watched it generate seven passable paragraphs, hovered over “send.” The output was median. Reasonable, sensible, helpful even, but tasteless. The kind of slop clogging every feed, written by nobody for nobody.
Then I stopped and read it a few more times and realized that the AI did its job and I failed.
I’ve been complicit in the problem I claim to hate. I built that custom GPT for these newsletters. I’ve crammed “good enough” content at the last minute, telling myself the curation and thinking were there even when the care wasn’t. And I’m exhausted reading the same average content everywhere, the same exaggerated claims backed by the same nothingness. I bet you’re damned tired of it too.
Building an edge has always meant doing what nobody else is doing. I was excited about NVIDIA when it was “just gaming chips” and Tesla when electric cars were a joke (unfortunately, I didn’t have much to invest back then, but I saw the asymmetry). I left a safe career at Deloitte in 2015 to start a tech company when everyone said it was career suicide. I started a PhD in dialogue systems right as the NLP papers today considered the foundations of GPTs and genAI dropped between 2017 and 2018, when most people thought natural language was a dead end.
Everyone told me these were bad ideas, stupid bets, reckless moves, but all delivered asymmetric returns years later.
So what’s the contrarian move now, when everyone’s chasing AI fluency, when every consultant is upskilling, when the herd is moving in one direction?
Being real when the world goes synthetic.
I’m tired of the average, the tasteless output splattered everywhere. So screw it.
THE HUMAN OVERRIDE
Screw the regularity, the volume, the consistency—everything the growth gurus preach about becoming a thought leader online. Life isn’t regular. Life doesn’t give you time for volume. Life isn’t consistent. And pretending otherwise is how we end up with feeds full of nothing.
I’m committing to a new way of writing and creating. Call it a human override of myself.
I write when I can bring care, not otherwise. You’ll get this newsletter every other week, sometimes less. I’ll miss issues when life gets in the way. That’s not a bug—it’s the entire point. I refuse to produce for the sake of producing, to add to the pile of median content we’re all drowning in.
I’m also exploring the edge of creativity and tech more deliberately. My family has a creative vein running through it. My dad ran a theater gig performing for kids in hospitals or people with various disabilities—not exactly glamorous, but he brought joy to audiences nobody else cared about. A brother makes films. Another acts. Another’s a chef. My sister’s a marketer. When I look at all of them, I sometimes wonder: what the hell am I still doing in tech?
Well, let’s unite it. I want to explore where tech supports human creativity and where it kills it. That’s the edge I’m most curious about now: the place where human imagination either flourishes or gets flattened by our tools.
Here are six human overrides you can try for the next couple of weeks. Just pick the ones that sting a little, the ones that expose where you’ve been settling for good enough:
Pick one project where “good enough” isn’t enough. Spend double the time it deserves. Refine until it sounds like you, until someone reading it would know it came from you and nobody else. Notice how much harder it is—and how much better the result feels.
Track your AI dependence for one day. Where are you outsourcing thinking versus accelerating it? Where are you letting the tool do the wrestling for you? Know your minimum ratio for work that rises above average. Mine’s 70/30 human/AI. Find yours.
Teach something you just learned. Write three paragraphs explaining a recent insight to someone outside your domain. If you can’t make it clear without jargon, you don’t understand it yet. Teaching forces synthesis; synthesis deepens mastery.
Name one thing you won’t outsource to AI. Not a category of tasks—one specific thing. The core of your work that reflects your judgment, your lived experience, your moral compass. Write it down. Treat it as non-negotiable.
Build one thing by hand this week, or cook a fine dinner. Something where speed doesn’t matter, where you can feel the difference between “done” and “done well.” Where care is visible in the result.
Have one real conversation. Not a Zoom call where everyone’s half-listening. A sit-down where you ask: What are we losing in this shift? What do we want to protect? What kind of work still feels worth doing? You’ll learn more in twenty minutes of honest dialogue than in a month of scrolling LinkedIn posts about “thriving in the AI era.”
SPARK
If everything is becoming fluid—roles, companies, definitions of work itself—what are you choosing to become?
Not your skills. Those shift. Not your title. That’s contingent. Not the tools you’ve mastered, because those become commoditized the moment everyone else learns them.
I mean the part of you that refuses to be reduced. That insists on care, on depth, on making something that matters. The part that would rather miss a deadline than ship garbage. The part that knows the difference between accelerating your thinking and outsourcing it entirely.
What is that for you?
I’m reorienting this newsletter around that question. I’ll write when I have something real to say, not when the calendar demands it. I’ll focus on the edge where technology and human creativity collide, where we still get to choose which one wins.
If this resonates, if you’re wrestling with the same tension, please hit “reply.” Tell me what you’re protecting. I’ll pull the threads into the next issue, and we’ll go deeper together.
The world is going synthetic. Let’s stay real.
