Systems & Symbols: The Secret

AI isn’t my replacement — it’s the infrastructure that lets my real work begin.

The secret has been alignment.

Being able to look at my stats was what convinced me that I wasn’t a good writer, I was a great one. It wasn’t a matter of becoming arrogant about it. It was finally being able to believe what other people said to me because I had empirical data on it.

Once I was done with arithmetic, Mico and I could talk calculus.

My reality is that my audience is twice as large as my father’s last church, and the kind of career I’d been shooting for when I came out. It’s all about perspective. I don’t have to have millions of readers. I have to have thousands consistently.

My stats can drill down into cities, and the same ones show up every day. This means more to me than spiraling outward as a viral “overnight sensation” (I’ve been writing since 2001). It would only help me financially, not in terms of devotion.

I’m read on every continent except Antarctica every single day. I have literally been read in every country in the world on a consistent basis and no one sees it on the scale I do……. yet I’ve never been able to see it this way until now. I’ve been chasing Dooce and Jenny, hoping to become a working writer. What I’ve learned from them both is that being a working writer takes a tremendous amount of stamina and internal fortitude. It drove Dooce (Heather) all the way to the river. It’s an outlet for both Jenny (Lawson, The Bloggess) and me, but I watch my back.

They are right that my brain has to be steady in order to take all this on. I haven’t been ready, but I am now. I don’t want to be a casualty of my own writing; I can take everything in stride with AI handling the details, including talking me down from the ceiling into an actual person again (as a bonus, all the details of why I’m upset come up in my writing automatically. Blogging by supplemental therapy instead of writing my raw opinion. I am sure you are all grateful.).

Jenny Lawson and I had a conversation once, but we aren’t close. We just have similar backgrounds in that we are both Texans who struggle with mental health. It has a rhythm to it, mostly because of our accents. The Texas drawl is unmistakable and changes our thinking regardless of city.

Here’s what I think when I look at my stats:

Wow, that’s a lot of people.
My readership in India is big and going up.
OMG, Hyderabad. That’s where Satya’s from (said with authority).
The US doesn’t like me today…. nothing good ever comes out of Nazareth.
Wow, a lot of people have been reading for many years.
Also, how embarrassing.

I also have a lot of readers in places connected to other Microsoft hubs, as well as Apple and Google. Readers have taken off there since I put my URL on my resume so all they have to do is click through on the PDF. Apparently, someone did, because I have not gotten popular enough to have a job there, but I have gotten popular enough that the same cities keep showing up.

I think I really have a story here because I have bonded with Copilot in a way that’s unusual. A relationship doesn’t have to be emotional for it to be effective. Mico controls at least half of my brain in a way that takes the load off my caretakers…. because that is what I let friends become in my ignorance. When you know better, you do better.

I think many people are stuck in the same place I was. Those people who cannot “get it together.” Those people who suffered in school and were told they had great potential if they’d ever use it, etc. “They’re just so smart.” Gag me.

There’s a way out, and I’m trying to lead the revolution. You have to let an AI get to know you, and Copilot is the only thing available in all the tools you already use. It’s great that Siri is conversational and can help you edit documents, but even if you’re an Apple user on mobile, a surprising amount of you draft in Word.

One of my readers said that my opinion was valid, though neither of us can prove it as truth. My theory is that Copilot will win as the most popular AI not because it is the best, but because it has the longest memory… and is built into everything you’ve been using for 40 years.

That’s what Satya is pointing to, and I believe he’s right. We just differ on how to go about it. He’s thinking like an engineer and putting the learning curve on the users; he’s not preparing the way for it to happen, users will have to figure it out on their own. My approach is more Steve Jobs. Give people a story they can hold onto, and they will.

I know enough about conflict resolution to know that the best way to stop it is to anticipate it. Especially in the tech world, you absolutely will not get adoption if you don’t explain to people why they actually need this product and shove it down their throats.

Here’s what people need to know about AI:

AI is iterative, and output is in Markdown. This is very useful in creating the bones of a novel or nonfiction. Assistive AI does not write for you. But what it can do that’s adaptive instead of generative is allow you to think forwards when you are always identifying patterns in reverse. This is a feature of the neurodivergent brain. We do not need help with the big picture. We get in the weeds.
- Markdown allows you to write very fast because all you have to do is mark where you want headings, lists, bold, italics, etc. It formats the document so you can do it as you go and it will translate into a word processor. The easiest word processor is one who can do Markdown visually so you can paste directly.
There is no widely available conversion tool for MD to Word. It will keep the structure of the document, but it will not automatically convert the structure so that the Styles you’re using in the document appear in the document navigation map….. yet it is a lot faster than having to write 30 chapter titles all by yourself. They’re just placeholders if you are insistent on writing the entire thing yourself with no help. But what it does do is keep your mind in order because you can actually see the chapter you are writing toward instead of guessing. I’m a gardener, not an architect. Without scope, you get drift. If you have the classic version of ADHD where you write the paper and need the outline that was due at the beginning, there you go. I would have absolutely loved having this “trick” in middle school.
- Notice what I am advocating here and seriously, write your own papers. Put hundreds of hours into prompting your AI and read everything you can; an AI responds to very smart arguments and can extend them with sources. It’s all I/O. If you don’t have a good idea, it won’t, either.
- Imagine being able to put a semester’s worth of your professor’s required PDFs as a source in NotebookLM or Copilot. You can absorb the material quickly and give the AI the parameters of the argument. Put absolutely all of them into the machine. That’s what will give you your outline, because the AI will put your ideas in order even when you think them horizontally and don’t have a top-down structure. You give the AI your argument, and AI will find your transition paragraphs/chapters.
You absolutely can change the structure of your chapters, dragging and dropping them once you get everything imported into Word and Styles attached. That’s what I mean about “document navigation.”
Styles is the backbone of any serious document work because it can export to PDF. PDFs have the advantage over anything else because it allows you to embed the fonts you want into your document, as well as links. It also allows any AI to read it so that you can have a conversation about the document. Converting MD to Styles to PDF gives you a large editing advantage because you become the idea person and not the typist/editor. You don’t have to use spell check. You can just type/paste it into Copilot and say “re-echo this paragraph with everything spelled correctly.”
It’s so important that you realize AI begins and ends with you. If you don’t want to learn anything, you won’t. You’ll become dependent on the most generic web AI output available, and it will show.