Earlier this week I confessed in here that I'd scoped about $60K of work for a client who paid me under $20K, and that she'd capped it off by sending me a "you didn't deliver" email at 11pm. A bunch of you commented. Some to encourage me. Some of you, I'm pretty sure, just pulled up a chair and grabbed the popcorn. Either way, you wanted to know how it ended. So here's the sequel. Nobody died. I'll lead with that. ------------------------------------ What I walked into ------------------------------------ Monday she blew a gasket. Strongly worded, escalated, the kind of email where you can feel the caps lock breathing through the screen. I did not respond like a calm professional. I spiraled. Half of me concocted a plan to pull up every receipt and go twelve rounds. The other half, the half I'm less proud of, came up with a half-baked plan to just roll over, apologize for stuff that wasn't even mine to apologize for, and turn myself into a doormat so the discomfort would go away. Running on no sleep, nursing a bruised ego, two bad plans and the stress of not having a newborn baby in the house yet... (wife's at 41 weeks, if she hits 42, she's gonna make that baby come out.) ------------------------------------ Then my COO blew up my whole game plan ------------------------------------ The day before the call, I got on with my fractional COO and word-vomited both of my terrible plans at her. She shut them both down. Didn't tell me to fight. Didn't tell me to fold. She handed me an actual plan. First, homework. Go build a point-by-point breakdown of all three agreements. Every deliverable, what's done, what's not, the percentages, and a whole separate column for the work we did that was never even in the scope. That document was her idea, not my heroic late-night brainwave. I didn't have it. She told me to go make it. Then the move. Don't walk in defensive, don't hand her the wheel. Lead with the full picture, so much clarity up front that she can't steer the thing somewhere sideways. She doesn't actually know what a finished marketing blueprint is supposed to look like, so I shouldn't be handing her the power to define "done." Show the whole list first, then talk.

I just realized something today, Jake's first classroom lesson isn't about Claude Code. It's a history lesson. Titled "A 2,000-Year Overnight Success." The argument: AI is not 70 years old. https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/classroom/d7ae60cf?md=147b0e486c964ba78a70cdc1d2d40c5d I don't need to rehash it here; if you skipped it, go back to read it. It was the first weekend of April, I had found Jake's videos the week before, then discovered Skool and dove into the classroom. I made a commitment to myself to read each page, not throw them into NotebookLM for the summary. To my disappointment, I see a super long history lesson. I sink into my chair. Eventually, I get to the end. AlphaGo. I had never heard of AlphaGo before; somehow, that story had slipped past me. I queued up YouTube on my TV and sat down for a Saturday evening documentary. Fascinating! AlphaZero started tabula rasa. Blank slate, no domain-specific human knowledge. Just the rules and play against yourself. In four hours, it rediscovered centuries of chess openings, endgames, and positional theory - then kept going past what humans ever found. Kasparov called it "like discovering the secret notebooks of some great player from the past." Those moves weren't invented. They were already in the game. The truth was latent in the mathematical structure of chess. AlphaZero excavated it. That's the archaeologist move - applied to a machine. It didn't study the tradition. It played to the pattern. Jake's throughline: "The mistake is thinking these layers replace each other. They don't. They stack." In the classroom, he could have started with how to prompt or an explanation of what a harness is. Instead, he started with the source of the whole thing. Because you can't build conviction on a trend. A pattern that's held for two thousand years isn't a trend. That's proof. I've worked with a family lumber business. 125 years old. Founded 1900, delivering coal by horse and buggy. Today, it's digital marketing, performance ads, algorithms, and closed-loop lead tracking. Every generation rebuilt what the company looked like. But the fourth-generation president still says what his father said: "Young man, we're not in the lumber business. We're in the shelter business." The tools stacked. The belief didn't.

Built another thing. Simple dashboard that collects all my tasks from different platforms into one place. It's an html file that lives on my computer. It only uses up 35MB of computer memory vs keeping asana open which uses up 25x as much (don't check my math). I can run Claude harder now. Also, pay no attention to all the overdue tasks, it's embarrassing and worse than my mathing. Stop gap while a better solution shows up.

A handful of folks from here have started connecting and sharing each other’s content on LinkedIn. Thought it would be nice to have a group over there where we can all contribute to and share our content to a wider audience through our connections. Hopefully continue to drive more folks to the conversations here as well. Please join if you’d like to connect! There’s already 20 of us in there after one day! Go boost your network. https://www.linkedin.com/groups/31160010

You guys keep liking and commenting on my confession posts, so here's another one. I wish at least one of these confessions wasn't real. They're all real (sad face). For the AI nerds in here (so, all of us): I think I'm addicted. It's worse than being hooked on a video game. A game at least has the decency to feel like a waste of time. This feels productive. Sometimes it actually is. At 1am, running six seven sessions at once? Not so much. ------------------------------------ What my nights have turned into ------------------------------------ Multiple Claude sessions going at once. When it got late and I knew I should be in bed, I'd flip every one of them with the /remote-control command so I could keep feeding the machine from my phone. Lying there in the dark. Waiting for the little dot to show up that means it's done thinking. Fire off the next instruction. Wait for the dot again. It's a slot machine. Drop the coins, pull the lever, watch for the dot. Like a freaking addict. One evening this week (I think it was Tuesday) I had three sessions all editing the same end-of-day file, and they kept overwriting each other's work. I'm sitting there getting genuinely angry. Then I caught myself cursing out a piece of software. Out loud. "You BLEEP, you broke it again." And I stopped. It's a machine, Ruben. Why are you getting triggered by a machine? And who's really doing the breaking? ------------------------------------ So I asked the machine why I can't quit the machine ------------------------------------ I did what any self-respecting addict does. I used the thing I'm addicted to, to figure out why I'm addicted to it. I'd read The Goal a while back (the Theory of Constraints novel everybody in operations swears by). I reopened it, had Claude walk me through the main concepts and tie them back to my business. And it clicked: I'm the bottleneck. My time, my attention. Not my team. Not my tools. Me. Then came the part that actually stung. The optimizing itself was the bottleneck. I'd been spending multiple two-hour sessions buffing an end-of-day routine whose entire job is to take fifteen minutes. The thing I kept "improving" stopped being my constraint years ago. I just couldn't put it down.