Perzen Patel

If you use AI like a vending machine, give it no context, and expect a publishable essay in one shot, you’ll get clichés and fluff. If you use it as a partner in the loop—brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising—it reflects your patterns back to you and makes them sharper.

I take the patterns and principles I agree with—signature moves I want to enhance, foibles I want to avoid—and add them to my personal “style guide”: a Google Doc full of guidelines and examples that train the model on how to think like me. Plugged into the project files of a ChatGPT or Claude project, it functions as a “writing brain” that brings... See more

Every time I publish a new essay, I go through the same ritual.

I download a Word document of the final draft and upload it to the project I have set up for my Every column Working Overtime in ChatGPT. Once it's there, I prompt it with one of my favorite AI incantations: What do you notice?

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to taken the token that says “it’s no big deal” or the token that says “it’s the end of the world”. Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.

If you’re talking about something new or novel, you’ll have to repeat yourself for years before you’re heard.

Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. That’s why we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business. It’s the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.

“Greatness is consistency.

Meditating once is common. Meditating daily is rare.

Exercising today is simple. Training every week is simply remarkable.

Writing one essay rarely matters. Write every day and you're practically a hero.

Unheroic days can make for heroic decades.”