I used to work with a guy.
He was a laugh, and great to share a few beers with. But could you ever get him to stop talking?
No - You’d literally have to factor in an additional 30-mins to each meeting for the inevitable overrun.
You’d know when people were on a call with this dude, as they’d be exchanging glazed ‘help me’ eyes to the person sat at the desk opposite them.
AI is now this guy.
And I’m seeing it across all communities I use and manage.
Ask AI to do something for you without specific instructions, and it’ll output verbal diarrhoea.
It’ll take 3 paragraphs to explain what you could condense into one sentence.
So I’m always reminding myself of the expression:
“Don’t say in 50 words, what you could say in 5”
Copywriting 101
Use the minimum amount of words required to get your point across.
So let’s go through this now.
Here’s the prompt I just gave Claude (Sonnet 5)
“Please write me a paragraph on common challenges creators face when negotiating brand partnerships, and what solutions experienced agencies provide to solve these challenges.”
Here’s what Claude gave:
Creators negotiating brand partnerships often run into a handful of recurring obstacles: undervaluing their own worth due to unclear industry rate benchmarks, getting locked into vague contracts with murky usage rights or exclusivity clauses, facing scope creep where brands quietly expect more deliverables than originally agreed, and struggling to manage the back-and-forth of negotiations while also producing content full-time. Experienced agencies address these pain points by bringing market data and comparable deal benchmarks to the table so creators can price their work accurately, drafting and reviewing contracts to spell out usage rights, payment timelines, and revision limits before anything is signed, and acting as a buffer between creator and brand so scope changes get renegotiated rather than absorbed for free. They also handle the administrative load of outreach, invoicing, and follow-up, freeing creators to focus on content while the agency leverages its relationships and negotiating leverage across multiple brand deals to secure better terms than an individual creator could typically get alone.
Aye aye aye.
Let’s re-write.
Creators negotiating with brands struggle with:
-Undervaluing themselves
-Agreeing to unfair biased contracts
-Negotiating high-value deals (whilst producing content full time)
Experienced agencies help by:
-Benchmarking against other creators
-Drafting fair contract terms
-Negotiating bigger deals on their behalf
-They go from leaving money on the table, to confidence they’ve maxed their deal values (whilst protecting time to grow their audience)
Notice the readability here too. Much easier to digest, no?
Can we go even further?
Helping creators go from leaving money on the table, to doubling their deal value (without losing time to grow their audience).
Sure, you could add ‘use the minimum amount of words required…’ to your prompts.
But would it be as succinct?
Apparently not.
The 25/50/25 editing rule
Here’s a cool workflow similar to my own (Written by Peter Yang on Substack - which now has it’s own AI slop detector btw):
Draft the first 25% by voice-dictating or writing without AI
Use AI in the middle 50% for help with editing / structure
Finish the final 25% yourself.
Not sure if I agree with the percentages, but you get the gist.
Today, I am writing this newsletter from scratch with my own fingers (with a bit of help from AI on the research i.e the above).
But last week’s newsletter was voice dictated on a walk, and re-structured by AI.
Another example:
Justin Welsh (900M+ LinkedIn impressions) uses ChatGPT to speed up his 3-step writing process ("meat," "trailer," "summary/mantra"), and says that AI's job is production support, not voice generation. Read the article here.
Which of course, is a complete fail as anyone using ChatGPT instead of Claude is silly ;)
Writing to get replies
Going back to the Hormozi quote above:
“If you want people to put more thought into their response. Put more thought into your question.”
Have you ever got an e-mail reply like this?
It literally just paraphrases the e-mail I’d sent originally.
It adds no value.
It should have been:
“What’s up Adam! Understood - catch up Monday - Leo”
But as it stands, it lost him brownie points as came across as fake and AI (the Em Dashes were a giveaway).
What would have been even better?
“Do you want me to come prepped with slides, or are we focusing just on Q & A?”
This way, he learns how to better position himself. And I get a better impression that this dude is taking it seriously.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) refers to this "distributed de-skilling".
"Skills erode fastest when the workflow is built so the AI decides and the human approves."
So, you need to invert it so a human frames and decides on the work → the AI executes non-valuable volume → With humans owning the exceptions, editing, output etc.
(here you can see how the 25/50/25 then works for non-writing based tasks as well)
The Power of Practise
I really enjoyed the Copywriting 101 section of this e-mail.
It was a mini-practise session on better writing. Going through the steps of stripping down and stripping down is a high value skill.
Because words sell.
And if each sentence has higher selling and persuasion power.
I can get disproportionate results from a single page that people will read and act on.
As opposed to a 20 page essay people will give up with and do nothing.
So never outsource to AI your highest leverage skills.
TL;DR
Think about the outcome you want, or point you want to get across
Think like a Copywriter and pull out the essence of your message
Use AI for the ‘messy middle’
Invert your process so it starts with you, instead of AI
Avoid distributed de-skilling by practising your highest value work (before asking AI to support you)
In other news. Assuming all goes well I will have baby boy number 3 this time next week.
So if I go a bit quiet, it’s because I’ll be prioritising sleep over content.
(better sleep after all, is the highest leverage skill you’ll ever learn)
Until next time.
Adam
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P.S - Want me to help you find you best AI use cases? Reply with what you’re struggling with, and I’ll help where I can.
P.P.S - 3 extra goodies for you:
1. Claude for e-mail subject lines:
How I get 52.98%+ opens on a newsletter to 190k subs here
2. Turn followers into brand partnerships (without relying on agencies)
5 day e-mail course on how I've delivered $500k+ in 6-months for influencers here
3. Resource vault
Everything else I've produced over the past 3 years here.