A senior partner told me last week she felt embarrassed about not having used AI in a real working session yet. She has thirty years of experience. She runs a complicated practice. She has more judgment in her bag than most consultancies have on staff. And she felt behind.
This is the wrong feeling to have. You are not late.
You are underleveraged.
The thing nobody is telling you.
The people getting the most out of these tools are not the ones who got there first. They are the ones who already know what good looks like, and who only needed one workflow before everything else clicked.
A model is useful in proportion to how much you can already tell when its output is wrong. A senior professional can do that on instinct, in a single read. A junior cannot. That is your edge.
A model is useful in proportion to how much you can already tell when its output is wrong.
The only thing standing between you and a useful first session is one practical workflow and an hour to try it.
What to do this week
- Pick the one piece of work that takes you the most time and the least joy. The recap, the inbox, the memo, the proposal, whatever feels most repetitive.
- Sanitize a real example. Strip names. Use placeholders.
- Run it through a single, specific prompt. Read what comes back the way you would read a junior's draft.
- Edit it. Sign it. Notice how long it took.
That is your first useful win. It is small on purpose. It is the only kind of win that compounds.
You are not late.
You are not late because the people you respect are not ahead. They are also just starting. The difference is they have stopped feeling embarrassed about it.
Quietly, alone, on a Tuesday afternoon, with one real piece of work, that is how this is supposed to begin.
Filed under Letter · The Leverage Years · Vol. I, Issue 9.