Mar 3, 2025 |
I played with A.I. a lot in the process of creating Truth or Dare. My first time doing this with a course.
I think it is enormously importantfor creators and teachers to practice radical transparency in the role of A.I. in their work. So here goes.
Because I am only beginning to discover A.I., a lot of this process is fresh ongoing learning for me. And I want to tell you exactly how I used A.I. to help me create Truth or Dare, and what I am learning in the process.
The first reason is that radical transparency around topics like this is everything to me. If one of my own teachers used A.I. to help create a course, and they hid this fact from me — intentionally or not — that would feel icky to me. My cardinal rule of marketing is, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” so I am giving you the honesty that I would want from my teachers.
The second reason is that I think having honest and nuanced discussions about the benefits and dangers of A.I. is the only way we can collectively find our way into responsible use.
A lot of this is a new exploration and ongoing learning for me, so there are no definitive expert answers here. Only a transparent sharing my process and my learning.
That is all we should ever be doing anyways.
So, here’s what I did, and am doing. I used ChatGPT and Claude (paid version), and treated them like an assistant who would help me organize my thoughts, generate ideas, and spit out drafts of what I wanted to create.
I’m pretty cocky about my own intellectual capacity and output. I think I have the best fucking ideas in the world.
So there was no way I was ever going to turn to A.I. for help generating ideas. And whatever ideas it did try to give me sucked. It was nice to confirm that even the best algorithm can’t think anything like I do.
However, where I did find A.I. very useful: helping my ADHD brain get started. For creative ADHD folks, I think sometimes the biggest barrier is that we have these incredible ideas in our heads… and the idea feels so big, the possibilities so infinite, that we kinda get paralyzed. (Raise your hand, ADHD posse….)
When I fed it my big, hairy, ambitious ideas, it spit back out to me simplified breakdowns, summaries, and drafts. This was truly amazing for no other reason than that it reminded my brain that the next step isn’t so complicated, and that I could do it.
Those breakdowns and summaries were rarely usable, but seeing them in front of my eyes closed the gap between the brilliant chaos of my mind and the next functional step. And ADHD folks know: the ability to take the next functional step is EVERYTHING. It is the difference between a finished project and procrastinating for 5 years and being depressed and ashamed.
This did not change my usual creative workflow, but it SHORTENED the time it takes for me get through it. This was, honestly, super fucking cool and something I will continue to experiment with.
Here’s another thing I found.
A.I. wants you to be more concise, have better “flow”, use what I think of as more “standard American” language, remove obscure references, substitute big words with simpler words, and edit your sense of humor to a more mainstream and less edgy one.
But that ain’t me. My natural style is that my thoughts jump from place to place, not always neat linear order. I write run-on sentences, use uncommon expressions and big words, curse a lot, and have a specific sense of humor that isn’t for everyone. (I love poop jokes and sex jokes, what can I say.)
If I allow AI to edit these “different” aspects out of my writing, it no longer sounds or feels like me. At all. And the transmission of the feeling of Simone… is the most important thing to me. Because without that feeling, there is no human-to-human connection. And without that human-to-human connection, there is…. nothing.
So, whatever A.I. wrote, I ended up having to do multiple extensive rounds of edits, adding back the “Simone-ness”, and rewriting sentences the way *I* would say it, and in the sequence and the style that I would say it… to the extent that, by the end, it looked nothing like the original A.I. output at all.
But still, in the end, even after hours and hours of editing and re-writing…. it STILL took me way less time than it normally does. Why?
Because… the “shitty first draft” helped to kick my ass into gear, and into writing mode. And normally I just spend a lot of time in frustrated paralysis.
Once again, I confirm: A.I. is most useful for helping my ADHD brain to get started.
Having a shitty draft in front of me makes me go: “This is wrong, that sounds stupid, ewww i would never do that… let’s get to work fixing this!”
Another pitfall of A.I. is that, since it is so good at spitting out templates and frameworks, it makes it tempting for creators and teachers to instantly produce templates and frameworks for their people.
I could see how easy it would be for people to pump these out ad infinitum, and to dangle these as “more value” for people… especially if they lack creative confidence.
And sometimes, it really can be. I love a good framework… in the right time and place.
But for my course to be an honest reflection of my intellectual ability, I had to ask myself: what is genuinely essential for my people’s transformation? What genuinely comes from my brain, my ethos, the Culture of Me?
What would I produce entirely on my own terms, without A.I.’s. help? And how would I do it?
Anything outside of that, it was clear to me, did not belong in my business. And it was good to come to clarity about this.
I will never, ever have an A.I.-generated template that I pass off as my own. If I point you to a template that did not directly come from my brain, I will tell you so explicitly.
And anyway, if A.I. is so good at creating templates and frameworks that genuinely help people…
… instead of creating them that way and passing them onto your people as if they are your own, you could just tell them which prompts to use to generate them themselves.
In summary:
(1) I’m enjoying using A.I. to help reduce my ADHD overwhelm, sort through the brilliant clutter of my mind, and make it easier for me to see and take the Next Functional Steps,
(2) This is verrrrry different from asking A.I. to do the thinking or the creating for you, and I think we should all be rigorous about not handing over our creative sovereignty to A.I. while still allowing it to help us where it’s effective, and
(3) You will always know exactly what part of my courses are ME, and what has been aided by A.I., and to exactly what extent. I think it is critical, and I think we should all our teachers and creators to the same standard.
Feb 27, 2025 |
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Feb 14, 2025 |
So, a little story first.
I started taking piano lessons around the time I embarked on my sabbatical. I stopped studying piano at 13 years of age and going back to it as an adult is something I always wanted to do, and now that I had all this time, I figured it was the perfect time.
And piano lessons taught me something fascinating.
I’m a hard worker. When the teacher tells me to work on a new technique or changing a bad habit, I take that seriously and practice with focus and dedication. (Something I never did as a kid, much to my mom’s chagrin.)
But here’s the thing… practicing hard was not enough.
And super annoyingly, practicing too hard had the opposite effect that I wanted.
It seemed like, past a certain point, practicing with all my might made me sound WORSE.
Why did more effort not yield better results? I’d sometimes cry after lessons. Not because my teacher made me feel bad but because I was so frustrated to not be able to break through.
And here’s the really weird thing.
Sometimes, I’d get so frustrated that I’d throw up my hands and abandon practice for a while, right? I’d say “fuck piano!” and just skip practice.
Then lesson time would roll around again, and I’d feel nervous that my teacher would admonish me. (Although she’s really nice and would never be mean to me… good asian child “get an A from teacher” syndrome never goes away!)
And you know what would happen?
After days of zero practice, I’d suddenly, mysteriously sound soooo much better than I did at my hardest working moments. And the techniques that I was tearing my hair out over would… roll off my fingers effortlessly.
What the actual fuck? This happened again and again.
And finally my teacher explained it to me:
When we’re too obsessed with getting something right, all the tension and effortfulness actually twists up our brains, and therefore muscles. And we end up sounding even worse than our baseline.
Giving our brains and muscles time to rest, and “forgetting about it” for a little while… allows our unconscious mind to actually integrate what we are learning.
And here’s an even crazier thing. I’d often tense up in front of my teacher when playing a difficult part because I wanted to “get it right”, and I’d sound terrible. I needed to relax to sound better, but no matter how many times she told me to relax, I couldn’t get myself to.
And we’d discover together that the only way I could get myself to relax enough… was to pretend that I’m drunk. (Yes, this is a real piano strategy I’d cultivated for myself.)
If I pretended I was drunk and sloppy and I’m just playing like whateverrrrr wheeeee… somehow, magically — or infuriatingly — I’d suddenly sound 100 times better. What the hell?
This taught me a crucial lesson.
Getting far, far away from the zone of “i’m putting in my 100% because I really this”…
… and saying instead “fuck it” and “i don’t care if it all goes to hell” and literally just abandoning it all for a while…
… made all these unconscious connections happen automatically that massively sped up my learning and added so much beauty and depth to my performance.
And this is exactly what I’ve done with my work for the past half year.
It’s not just that I am more relaxed and refreshed now. It’s like…. It feels like my mind got a whole OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE.
Like going from iOS 2 to iOS 20.
After 6-7 months of NOT even thinking about work, so many thorny creative + business problems that I’d been trying to solve for years… magically solved.
Brilliant next-level ideas… downloaded.
My ability to SEE things… massively upgraded. it’s like I moved up from the top of my neighborhood hill to the peak of Mt. Everest.
This is the power of unconscious processing that happens when you give yourself some “fuck it” space.
To be sure, I don’t have a full picture of how this is true yet.
Because I’m not fully out of my sabbatical period.
But I feel it.
I am already starting to feel glimpses and trickles of it.
The trick is, when the time comes to “abandon practice,” that you have to FULLY let go.
When I say “fuck it,” I mean “FUCK IT.”
And this is not to be confused with being generally indifferent, or avoiding challenges.
The two ends of the paradox are: give it your all, and then let go just as completely
Do your drills, and then forget about it and go take a long nap.
I want to be clear: being able to take months off from work is a great luxury and privilege. I feel enormously lucky and grateful to have had it, and am well aware that not every deserving person gets it.
But I share this because I see so many people not even allowing themselves small amounts of rest and unplugging.
Or feeling terrified that, once they let go of the tight grip on their work, it’s all gonna come tumbling down. Or, even if they do take a break, feeling paranoid about “losing momentum” the entire time and not fully being able to let their minds rest.
I get it. it took ME time and practice to TRUST the rest, too.
I’m still working on it, actually. (It’s hard to 100% decondition a mind that’s been programmed by capitalism for decades!)
But hopefully this message serves as an extra reminder that — if you are resonating with this — it is safe for you to soften into your next operating system upgrade.
And know that you can trust the infinite wisdom and massive operating power of your unconscious mind.
Whether it’s 6 months of 6 weeks or even just 6 minutes…
… you deserve to say “fuck it” and rest.
Feb 12, 2025 |
No one taught me how important my Asian ancestral heritage was in helping me be good at business.
I had to figure it out on my own. And here’s what I figured out.
I am thankful for my Confucian heritage.
It instilled in me one of the most defining values I hold, which has been passed down in my family: education is the most valuable asset in the world. More than any material possession. Without it having to lead to any capitalism-friendly “outcome.” Enriching one’s mind is its own reward, and the most valuable one.
This kept me focused on learning business for the way it sharpened my mind, without being anxious for material “returns”. This non-transactional relationship I had with business is exactly what kept me in it long enough for me to get really good at it.
I am thankful for my Taoist heritage.
It taught me that no one thing is separate from the ecology surrounding it. That you are not separate from me. That there is only Oneness.
That cultural knowing is exactly what planted the firm attitude in me that my thriving is vitally interlinked with yours, that I cannot use, manipulate, and extract from you to get ahead. When I cheat you to get what I want, I only end up cheating myself.
The Taoism baked into my culture also taught me this. When there is an up, there is a down, and when there is expansion, there is contraction.
Don’t get too excited on a good day, and don’t be too depressed on a bad day. Proverbs of this nature are passed down and repeated in my family.
This is exactly what gave me the steadfastness to keep going long enough to see my efforts bear full fruition in the long term.
I’m thankful for my animinist/shamanic heritage.
One of the teachings I’m known for is the idea of “the spirit of your business.” I believe your business literally has its own spirit. So does your social media account. So does your phone. So does your email.
I’m often asked where I got this idea from. And while certain sources gave me inspiration for articulating it out loud, it was always obvious to me because of the animism that is part of our traditional culture.
Western culture sees certain things as living (birds, trees, humans), and other things as inert (mountains, seas, the soil).
Animism recognizes everything as alive and conscious — each different thing in its own way.
This way of seeing everything in my business ecosystem — even things that are dead or inert according to Western culture — as ALIVE, CONSCIOUS, and being in a LIVING RELATIONSHIP — has been key to my creativity and genius-level intuition about making strategic moves for my business.
The ideology around ancestral veneration that is central to my culture (which is half-Confucian and half-animist/shamanic, I think)… also turned out to be critical for my business success.
Koreans believe that our lives are closely interlinked to our ancestors.’ We are also taught that everything good that happens to us is NOT only due to our own merit, but due to our ancestors’ benevolent deeds.
Almost like I’m receiving delayed good karma for what my ancestors did.
For example, my mom tells me the story of her grandmother, who would always welcome into her home travelers who needed a place to rest.
She would feed them the best food, give them a warm place to sleep, and send them on their way with more provisions.
And she would tell my mom: “I do this for you. All the good I do will come back to you. So, when you grow up, you must remember to be kind to everyone, and help as many people as you can.”
The recognition of interrelationship across time and space is baked into our worldview.
Do you know what this means?
It means that, from day 1, I knew that my business would fail if it didn’t benefit others before it benefited me.
Generosity and benevolence had to be the primary values through which I filtered all of my business decisions.
This was not only the way I created success for myself (it all flows back to me, always), but the way I create good fortune for my descendants.
Actually, I’ve oriented my business to community care in much more radical ways since I became a mother.
Because now I think acutely about my son’s well being, and I want him to have a good future.
The best way for me to invest in his future well-being is taking care of the community around me now.
Yes, we were a colonized and impoverished and war-torn people, living to this day with a legacy of trauma.
But.
I’m not prosperous in spite of being Korean.
I’m prosperous because I am Korean.
(Please, substitute “Korean” with whatever you are.)
What about you?
If you’re from a non-dominant culture, in what ways has your heritage made you stronger, better, more prosperous?
Jan 21, 2025 |
Something that is super simple to do and underrated is gaslighting yourself into thinking you’re really hot.
If you haven’t done this, I highly recommend it.
I say to myself “you’re so cute” every time I pass by a mirror and always hype myself up about how good-looking I am.
The key here is to NOT connect it to specific features (“i have good legs”) or states (“i look good when …”) it’s an all-encompassing, unconditional, generalized “I’M SO CUTE IT’S NOT FAIR”.
Whenever anyone makes a less than flattering remark about my looks, I am literally confused because do you have eyes?
Literally (1) no one is stopping you from doing this, (2) it costs ZERO dollars to do this, and (3) the ROI is incredible.
Jan 15, 2025 |
Find a Black woman, or Black queer person talking about it, and listen to them.
If you have a problem worth spending money on, hire them.
If you’re skeptical about that, and doubtful that the color of one’s skin makes someone automatically more qualified (and I really agree with that), allow me to explain why.
I guess not all, but an overwhelming majority of man-made problems plaguing our world today are a result of colonization and white supremacy. Everything from housing insecurity to your personal insecurities.
And here’s the thing.
Non-Black people of color (like myself) have a different relationship to white supremacy than Black people.
Non-Black people of color (like myself) were extended a promise — which has always been an illusion and a lie, but white folks perpetuated it hard and for a long time — that we have a chance of sitting with white people and benefiting from their privilege as long as we did the right things.
As long as we spoke English. With the right accent. As long as we worked hard. As long as we renounced and shamed our own traditions and people. As long as we were willing to forget historical harm perpetuated to us. As long as we ate the right food, mimicked white habits, and glorified white ideals and norms.
let me be clear, this was always an illusion and a lie. We were never, ever going to sit at their table and fully share their privileges. They wouldn’t have it.
But we were offered the scraps, and told — if you get in line, you’ll get more. And one day, you’ll be able to have ALL of it.
Just keep being/doing more of what we told you.
Many of us — often out of wanting to just survive, and sometimes out of ambition — swallowed that lie hard and deep.
And fell in line with what white supremacy told us.
And here’s the thing: that same lie was never sold to Black people, and particularly Black women.
The message, for so long, continuing into today, was crystal clear.
“No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be one of us, you’ll never sit at our table. And in fact, the harder you try, the more we’ll deride and punish you.”
This is the reason why Black folks in general, and Black women (and queer folks!) in particular, have the clearest view of reality, and the best access to wisdom about what’s really fucked up about the world and how to fix it.
They didn’t have a choice as to whether to buy into the lies of white supremacy. Because they were systematically excluded from even being offered crumbs that came with “willing” subjugation and compliance.
From the beginning, Black folks (and particularly women and queer people) had no choice to see reality for exactly what it is.
They didn’t have the choice of buying into their own oppression the way non-Black people of color did. So, in a way, they were “forced” into clarity about the entire death cult that is white supremacy.
White supremacy doesn’t benefit white people either. In fact, white people are poisoned by it. Any system that is premised on anti-human principles, poisons those who buy into it.
The same way the patriarchy poisons men.
If you’re white, you both participate in, and are harmed by, white supremacy.
That’s why I say — regardless of whether you’re white or yellow or brown, if you want the answer, go to Black people.
Go to Black women and queer people.
They are the greatest experts and pioneers on whatever problem that you’re trying to solve — whether it’s business growth or relationship issues or nutrition — which has been inevitably created by, and/or perpetuated by white supremacy. Because white supremacy has extended its poisonous tentacles to every area of life.
Sometimes it’s a struggle to find Black teachers. Not because there aren’t a lot of them (there’s TONS AND TONS of them who are way, way more qualified and experienced than the average white counterpart), but because white supremacy has intentionally undermined and silenced them and punished them for doing the same things that white people are rewarded for.
But that’s even more of a reason you should seek them out. Don’t give up on the first day of your search. Tell everyone what you need help with, and tell them that you’re specifically looking for Black teachers, consultants, speakers, and coaches. Keep searching. Follow the breadcrumbs of information.
I’m not primarily following Black creators/teachers for some kind of social justice reason.
I’m following them because they have the best information about how to get from where I am and where I want to go.
History has forced them to be 10x more qualified and 100x more insightful than everyone else.
I feel a little nervous posting this, only because talking pointedly about a group of people I don’t belong to feels… a little risky.
But I have to say it out loud because I wish someone had told ME this long ago. It would have saved me soooo much time and wasted effort.
