AI might have kept me from writing this line

The reaction to my Independence Day newsletter highlights why you should push yourself to write your key first drafts without AI.

Here are some of the replies:

This, this, 1,000 times this!

I love this missive so much! Especially this line:

Today’s was true perfection. [screenshot of key line]

The line they kept pointing to:

“Clients demand what you let them.”

Here’s what matters for today: I didn’t come up with that truth until about 40 minutes into forcing my way through a complete first draft.

If I had pivoted to AI when the writing got tough, I doubt I would have discovered that idea.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you know I’m a big proponent of delegating lots of work to AI. Just not all of it.

For core deliverables where distinctiveness of writing matters most, here’s why writing your own first drafts pays off in the long run:

• Your best thinking often appears after you’ve exhausted the top-of-mind ideas. AI makes it easy to flee that discomfort, and you’ll miss the insight you might reach only by pushing through it.
• You avoid anchoring on what AI gives you. When you look at several somewhat-vanilla-but-appealing options that AI spits out, your brain usually starts editing those instead of creating novel concepts.
• You keep strengthening your writing “muscles.” This isn’t some stoic “hard is good” motivational ploy. It’s intensely pragmatic. How will you even recognize good writing if you let your ability to produce it atrophy?

I get it – writing can be arduous! Sometimes it feels like I’m thinking so hard I’m leaving glistening bits of brain matter splattered across the page. And having a cheerful friend a few keystrokes away, ready to crank out “good enough,” is super tempting.

Use that happy helper for commodity content where flair and precision don’t matter as much. So you create more time for human first drafts of your core deliverables.

Then use AI to revise those hard-won drafts toward your best work.

After I force myself through each newsletter first draft, I run it through a Project loaded with my strongest examples and ask for suggestions. I reject plenty – mostly because they water down my voice. But some make the piece better.

When you push yourself to write your own first drafts and then consider AI’s well-trained edits, you’re augmenting your best, rather than replacing it with something that’s likely lesser.

And you’re ensuring you still access your best ideas, even if they’re swimming below the surface.