Where should effort go in the AI age?
Stop what you're doing.
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All digital courses I have ever bought were based on the idea of doing more. Publishing more online, on more platforms. Sharing more ideas, reading more, collaborating more, offering more.
It’s deeply engraved in us. Doing more. Busyness. Up until a few hundred years ago, working a hundred hours per week was normal. It was survival.
And it’s that same survival mechanism that makes you anxious when you’re not busy.
That’s why the transition from thinking in terms of more to thinking about the system level work will be a difficult one. Some won’t be able to do it at all. I want you to be among the ones who thrive.
Nobody has made this transition more visibly than Michael Simmons. Here’s what he writes in the latest issue of Blockbuster Blueprint:
“In 2016, I wrote a business plan for my company called Seminal. The vision was to break down the article creation process into its primitive components (research, angle development, writing, editing, distribution) and systematize each one so thoroughly that quality would no longer depend on any single person.
For years, I sacrificed thousands of hours I could have spent writing to instead work on the system that produces writing.
(…)
Then came Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.6 this year
Suddenly, the system I’d been building for a decade had the missing pieces.
Over the last few months, I’ve written a weekly 5,000-word article that I’m proud of. As a result, the average engagement of my posts has been steadily increasing. All of these articles were AI-generated using my Blockbuster process.
Not only that, rather than feeling replaced, I felt profoundly empowered. Working at the system level still requires all of my taste, judgment, and intellect, just applied at a fundamentally higher leverage point.
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says over 80% of people who make this transition end up loving the new baseline. Daniel Gilbert’s research in Stumbling on Happiness suggests we’re terrible at predicting how we’ll feel about the future, and that the best predictor is looking at people who’ve already crossed the bridge. If that holds, this bodes well for those willing to fully commit to promoting themselves to the systems level.”
Below:
How to redirect effort in service work so you become irreplaceable (or very, very difficult to replace).
Content creators need to put more effort in this (now more than ever).
The future of solopreneur marketing.