Obsession is a dangerous trade. from Monsters of God

I found Monsters of God by accident on HBO. I was mindlessly scrolling for something to watch, but once I put it on, I didn’t get up.

I was hooked first by the characters, then the history, then the smuggling. It’s a crime story with every reptile I’ve never heard of in it. And the people…the people were exactly like you think they’d be. I kept thinking I’d turn it off after ten minutes and focus on work. I didn’t.

Hank Molt (great name) is one of the main characters and an apparent legend in that industry. He ran a pet store in Philadelphia and stocked it with animals he found overseas, often carrying them into the country in suitcases, which, customs barely checked.

Eric Goode, who created the series, says Molt liked that there were laws at all, because breaking them made it a better game. In the 1970s he went on what he called shopping trips with other dealers. The Wall Street Journal later quoted him on what they packed.

The gun to shoot someone, the machete to cut off our fingers if we were bit by a taipan.

There were no rules, a lot of private deals, and a snake that can kill you if you guessed wrong. They brought a blade to cut their own freakin’ fingers off if they were bit.

Then I got stuck on a price list.

Names, Then Numbers

Molt circulated lists of rare reptiles, snakes and turtles and lizards with prices next to their names, and mailed them to collectors and to zoos that competed for the same animals. Before that, collectors and zoos bought and sold by calling each other, or by shaking hands.

But the list did something more important than advertise inventory.

It told the market what to believe.

People saw prices that seemed absurdly high compared with anything they’d seen before. Yet, rather than immediately destroying demand, the list helped make the animals feel more rare and more collectible. A reptile that had been an obscure creature in a distant part of the world became a named item in a catalog, available through a person who appeared to have unusual access.

→ The price not only reflected the value.

→ The price helped create it.

Then Washington made the sheet more powerful by accident. The Endangered Species Act came into effect in 1973 and Molt’s business boomed, because an endangered label meant rarer, and rarer meant he could charge more. A law written to protect the animals raised their price instead.

Other dealers noticed. Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida rival, ran Molt’s playbook, selling smuggled reptiles to collectors, pet owners, and zoos. Time’s reporting on the series puts his sales and trades at millions a year.

There’s No Pudding

Harry Beckwith named this in 1997 in Selling the Invisible, then said it blunter in 2022 in The Invisible Promise.

“There’s no pudding in a service, so there’s no proof.”

Beckwith said, “Your price is not just your price. It is a quality cue.”

When people can’t inspect the thing, they inspect the tag. He tells the old story about the carpenter who charged $2 for hitting the nail and $43 for knowing which nail. Charge for the years it took to know which nail.

My favorite piece of evidence in his book is about coffee. At $18, buyers of organic coffee got more passionate about it, and they could recite roughly twice as many details about what they were drinking. The higher number made people believe more, and study the thing harder.

The reptile list ran the same experiment with snakes.

Invisible expertise

The blank page test

The $43 in the carpenter story was for knowing which nail. That knowing is invisible expertise. It’s the judgment that only shows up when you’re in your zone of genius. When you’re operating from unconscious competence.

You listen for two minutes and you already know what’s wrong, and if someone asked you to write down how you knew, you’d stall, because the steps aren’t sitting there as steps anymore. They compacted. You got so good at the work that the work disappeared from your ability to articulate it.

Why you can’t say it

That’s why it happens. Repetition sank the skill below words. The better you are, the less you can narrate it. You’ve been doing it for 10+ years and the manual you could have written as you were building those patterns has disappeared.

What’s left is a feeling in the call, a tell in their voice, a thing you notice that a competent person with a checklist will miss.

The borrowed job title

When you can’t say it, you sell familiar language or you borrow a job title. Someone asks what you do. You say you coach, or you consult, or you help people with the thing you’ve spent 10+ years getting really good at. The sentence comes out different every time, because you honestly aren’t quite sure HOW you do what you do. They nod, then they ask what you charge and if you are how I used to be you say “it depends.”

You leave the conversation having been treated like a less expensive version of someone you’re not, and you can’t correct it because you still don’t have a sentence for the actual thing.

I used to do this on my own calls. I can sit with a client and name their offer in one pass, then get on a sales call for my work and describe it as a pile of verbs (help, advise, extract, train). The work was there, I just never put it on a sheet.

What I Put On Mine

One line on my list is called Cognitive Fingerprint™.

The person who buys it is a founder whose team still has to wait for them after a call, because the knowledge is in one head. When we’re done they have a written extraction they can hand to people… their patterns, framework…their thinking, in their language.

That’s the whole card… a name, who it’s for, what they walk away holding, who it’s not for, and a price, which I put on the card I send them, not in this essay.

Here it is, item 001 on my actual sheet.

I have other lines with the same idea. Each one is something a buyer can say yes or no to without me giving a tour of my whole brain.

I can’t tell you how many opportunties I lost at workshops, calls or conferences when people asked how I could help them. I knew I could but I couldn’t articulate it.

The Gap

You can see what the sheet did, and you saw one of mine. Now it’s time to write yours.

The Monster Price List is the prompt (or the Skill) that digs that sheet out of your own calls. You feed it one to three transcripts of you working (your website and LinkedIn help, but the calls are where the expertise actually shows up), and it hunts for the moments a buyer valued… the “how did you know that,” the thing you fixed for free, the “could you also” you never invoiced.

Then it writes one to five cards… a name pulled from words that were actually said, a buyer you can picture, something they walk away holding, who it’s not for, a number they can argue with. Every card is quote-locked to a real moment from your own tape. You shouldn’t have to sit through a questionnaire first.

The full prompt and the downloadable Skill are below. Attach a transcript (or 3) of a coaching call, discovery, onboarding etc.. Send the first card.

It works from the moments your expertise already leaves on tape. It won’t map the whole of how you think (that’s a deeper extraction), but it will name and price what you already sell right now.

Quick note: The video above was our first Live Build / Community Call where I took people behind the scenes in what I’m building and as one subscriber said “a window into your thinking.” Really enjoyed it and will be doing more of them soon.

Last week I taught a four-day Claude Code training. Close to 200 people live each day, 600 registered. Creative strategists and copywriters, most of them brand new to any of this.

Day one wasn’t the fun part. Day one was just getting everybody installed. I wasn’t about to throw a copywriter into a terminal, so we worked inside the Claude desktop app... and even that was a fight. Getting some folks to install the app got a bit dicey.

But somewhere around day two, I noticed something pretty cool.

The site I was teaching from kept getting better, and I hadn’t planned for it to. Every night, it rewrote itself.

Here’s what happened…

After each day, I’d grab the transcript. The whole thing. Plus the chat, plus every question anybody asked. And I’d hand it all to Claude Code and ask:

Based on this, what did people need that I didn’t cover? Is there a better way to structure these resources based on the questions people were asking? What do I need to expand on? What do I need to simplify?

Then I’d tell it to build those resources and drop them into the site.

By the next morning, yesterday’s questions were pages on the site.

Somebody asked about Firecrawl and Exa, two tools I hadn’t planned to touch. So after we wrapped, I said go pull the docs for both and build me a comparison chart, side by side. Next morning, there it was, sitting in the resources.

Another day I recorded a two-minute video after the call, handed it to Claude, and said embed this nicely right here. The people who missed that part live could now watch it sitting exactly where it belonged.

The site got smarter off real feedback. Not off what I guessed people would need ahead of time. And the part that still makes me grin... day three was about building websites in Claude Code. The site I was teaching from was built in Claude Code. So I just pulled up the actual files and showed everybody how the thing they were looking at got made.

Now think about where a course normally lives.

You build it, then you pour it into Kajabi or Circle or Skool, and from that point on you’re working inside their box. Their modules. Their layout. Their idea of what a lesson is supposed to look like.

And sure, maybe you update yours now and then. But you’re doing it within their model. Figure out a better way to teach it halfway through and you’re fighting the template just to rebuild it.

Mine wasn’t capped, and it wasn’t boxed. The site rewrote itself almost in real time. A question from the afternoon’s call was a new page that night, sitting right where it belonged.

I was able to build the exact flow, the exact look, the exact learning experience I wanted. The structure bent to the lesson instead of the lesson bending to the platform.

And before you decide this is some elaborate setup only I could pull off... it isn’t. The whole thing is just files and folders on your computer.

That’s the line I hammered every single day. As crazy as Claude Code looks, strip it back and it’s just files and folders on your computer.

You point it at a folder, and that folder is everything it can see.

You open the same folder in Obsidian for a nicer view... still the same folder.

There are only ever those two moves, and everything happens inside the folder.

So the teaching site was a folder. The transcript went into the folder. Claude read the folder and wrote new files back into it.

There’s no hidden layer.

There’s a folder, and a model that can read and write inside it.

Once you see it that way, the question stops being “could I build this” and turns into “what do I point it at.”

So now you’ve got the idea.

A living folder beats a boxed-in platform, and the engine is a nightly loop. Feed it what actually happened. Ask what’s missing. Let it build while you sleep.

But, knowing that and running it are two different things.

You still need to know:

How to make Claude Code’s output not look like generic AI slop.

How to turn a flat strategy doc into something that looks like your client’s own brand.

How to catch your own mistakes before a client does, without trusting one model to grade its own homework.

That’s what’s below, an upgraded version of what I talked about on the call.

I pulled three resources straight out of that training. Each one’s a thing you can run in the next twenty minutes.

* The Firecrawl Microsite Recipe How I stopped sending Google Docs and started sending interactive sites that look like the client’s own brand, built from their real assets. The exact steps, including the part where it pulled product shots off a retail shelf I never set foot in.

* The Dual-Model QC Loop How I have Claude write a review prompt grounded in the actual codebase, then hand it to Codex to tear the work apart, so two models check each other instead of one model approving itself. Includes the fix for a trap one of my sharper students caught live.

* The Tools & References Sheet The exact sites I reach for... where I get design inspiration so the output doesn’t read as AI-made, where I pull official AI logos, and the one context-window number that tells me when to hand off before the model goes dumb.

So point Claude at a folder. Hand it yesterday. Ask what’s missing.

Then go look at what it built while you slept.

-Max

P.S. I got some really good feedback from the people on the call but after you watch it, let me know what you think.

I am planning to do more of these but like the course, I want to make sure it fits into the box that you want.

We decided to try something new…

Instead of your standard “How-To” content, we thought we would up the stakes. Let people submit a problem via a locked “Vault” and when we flip the camera on, it unlocks and we get to solving it.

The problem submitted was:

I lack a reliable, low-friction system that captures and regularly resurfaces each client’s long-term personal context and last-session commitments before calls, so I show up unprepared and risk renewals and family financial stability.

(Note: This was the output of using the 5 Why’s Prompt to Drill help clarify the real proble and why it sounds like AI)

As I read it out loud, every instinct inside of me is screaming the same thing…

Start. Building. Now.

AI is incredible. With a few taps of the keys and hitting enter a few times, you can send it off to do your bidding and it will return an answer that sounds like a senior level consultant worked on it for weeks.

But just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it is good.

So instead I tell my instincts to chill for a second and instead, say: “To me, it’s still not drilled down enough.”

I remove myself from “answer now” mode and notice something I’d never put into words before.

Paid subscribers get access to my prompt + workflow vault and I just added an entire section for some of my favorite Claude Skills

The Layers Underneath

I ask Claude to unbundle the problem from first principles.

What is this person actually trying to accomplish?

Claude comes back with layers…lots of them:”The surface-level framing is about a missing system - specifically one that captures and resurfaces client context before calls. But there are several layers underneath worth examining.

The Information Problem

There are actually two distinct information challenges bundled together here:

Long-term personal context - This is the accumulated understanding of who this client is, what matters to them, their history, their patterns. It’s the kind of knowledge that builds over months or years of relationship.

Last-session commitments - This is much more tactical. What did we agree they’d do? What did I promise to follow up on? This is accountability tracking.

These require very different capture mechanisms. One is ongoing synthesis, the other is discrete action items.

The Timing Problem

The statement says “before calls” - which raises the question: how far before? Five minutes? The night before? The morning of?

This matters because it determines whether you need a push system (information comes to you) or a pull system (you go get it when you remember to).

The Friction Problem

“Low-friction” appears twice conceptually - in capture AND retrieval. But these often conflict. The more structured and thorough your capture, the more useful your retrieval... but the higher the capture friction.

The Stakes Framing

Here’s where I want to push a bit. The problem escalates quickly from “unprepared” → “risk renewals” → “family financial stability.” That’s a big leap.

Some questions this raises:

Is “showing up unprepared” actually why renewals are at risk? Or is that an assumption? Could renewals be at risk for other reasons that preparation wouldn’t solve?

Is this problem actually happening right now, or is this a fear about what could happen?”

Level 4

The old me would have started building immediately. Hit enter. Watched Claude spin up something impressive.

Shipped it.

Felt productive.

Discovered three days later it solved nothing.

I’ve been burned by that before (be honest, we all have). Hours on workflow looks impressive but just like those n8n workflows your see people promoting on the socials, don’t actually produce anything meaningful.

Quick aside - you mean to tell me you created a workflow that has saved you 100 hours a week and made you 3M+ in profit and you are just going to give it to a stranger on X or LinkedIn because they retweeted it? Social media…

Takes a deep breath, returns to article…

And that’s when I said it out loud:

“It’s almost like you’re trying to solve from Level 4 when Level 1 hasn’t even been discovered yet.”

The problem people bring you is almost never the actual problem.

It’s a symptom bundled with assumptions, wrapped in a solution-shaped request.

AI makes solving feel free. But solving the wrong problem costs you time rebuilding.

Costs you trust when the solution fails.

Costs you the insight you would have found if you’d drilled first.

The better AI gets, the more expensive this mistake becomes. You can build the wrong thing faster and more impressively than ever.

Doctors. Ducks. Blueprints.

Doctors call it differential diagnosis.

Patient comes in with chest pain. A bad doctor treats the symptom.

A good doctor creates a list of every condition that could cause chest pain.

* Heart attack

* Acid reflux

* Pulmonary embolism

* Anxiety

* Burrito from Tuesday

Then systematically rules them out.

If an important potential condition is missed, no method will supply the correct conclusion.

The best treatment in the world won’t help if you’re treating the wrong thing.

Programmers call it rubber duck debugging.

Developer stares at the same six lines of code for forty-five minutes. Finally, they explain it line-by-line to a rubber duck. The act of articulating forces them to examine each assumption. Most of the time, they discover the solution mid-sentence. Not because the duck gives advice. Because the explanation reveals what they’d been taking for granted.

The duck doesn’t solve. The duck forces you to discover Level 1.

Architects won’t draw until they understand how the family actually lives. Their daily routine…time spent in each room. They refuse to build until they’ve drilled past “I want an open floor plan” to “I want to see my kids while I’m cooking.”

It’s the same pattern in a different domain.

The people who are great at building are the ones who refuse to build first.

Your Last Seven Days

Think about your last week with AI.

How many times did you paste something in and hit enter before asking:

* What am I actually trying to accomplish?

* What would success look like?

* What assumptions might be wrong?

If you’re like most people…

Just about every darn time.

This isn’t because you’re lazy. It’s because AI is designed for speed and keeping you engaged. For creating an affinity that makes you want to come back and spend more time on their platform.

You ask, you get.

The dopamine hits before you’ve finished reading the response.

Except the math doesn’t work.

Every half-solved problem boots you back to the beginning. Every misaligned solution demands a do-over. Every impressive-looking output that doesn’t quite fit wastes more time than typing the original prompt.

The thing that makes AI feel fast is the thing that makes your results slow.

After the Drill

After we drilled down on the client prep problem, then we built.

Claude created the Client Prep Engine. A Skill that transforms whatever client inputs exist into pre-call briefs. Transcripts, notes, emails. All processed into something incredibly useful.

But here’s what made it good…

Because we’d drilled first, the Skill knew to ask about timing. Knew to separate long-term context from session commitments. Knew to handle the friction problem explicitly.

None of that would have been there if we’d built from the surface request.

What emerged from the drill-down was a pattern (you know I loveeee my patterns).

These aren’t complicated. But they force you to discover Level 1 before you start solving from Level 4.

You can grab the Client Prep Engine skill.

Or build your own. Let Claude drill before you build.

The old version of you hits enter. The new version asks one question first:

What’s Level 1?

-Max

If you enjoyed this article and this training, we just started a community where our goal is run more experiments and help people think differently about AI.

You can lock in the entry price for life of $27/month and even give it a spin for 7 days to see if ya like it.

Check out Beware The Default Here.

It’s the first Saturday of the new year. I should be recovering from multiple days of cake, cinnamon rolls and bagels. Instead, I’m on a livestream demoing a personal management dashboard I built in my boxers.

I’ve been building and talking with Zain Haseeb for six months. Mid-call, we decided to say 'screw it' and just hit record. No more talking about it.

Just show people what we've been making

We started by recapping our “meeting” two weeks ago. Four of us met in Atlanta and sat around my dining table for three days straight. Zain Merchant (or “little Zain” to help keep it straight) brought a desktop computer. Not a laptop. A desktop. With its own power supply.

Four dogs running around licking our feet. A monitor stacked on pretzel boxes. Twelve-hour brainstorming days. I forgot to eat lunch. Twice.

This was not a polished operation. (We’re proud of this.)

The livestream was us showing what came out of that.

Halfway through, Zain says something that I had to write down.

“I just feel like a kid again. Like you’re outside exploring and doing things you never thought you could do.”

What “Kid Again” Actually Looks Like

His wife has a very successful career but, is by no means, a developer and doesn’t know how to code.

They were in the kitchen making dinner, she had an idea for something that would help her colleagues at work, they sketched it out on the counter, and they just... built it.

A working prototype. In about an hour.

I had a similar thing happen.

All of my stuff is in a million different apps. Three different calendars, Claude, Stripe, Substack, Notion, etc.

So on Friday, I started building my own dashboard that connected all of them together in the EXACT way that I wanted it.

I caught my girlfriend peering over my shoulder (probably…definitely…because I didn’t hear something she said) and her eyes lit up.

We spent the next 2-3 hours building her, her own.

That’s what “feeling like a kid again” actually means. Not productivity. Play.

The Friction Collapse

Here’s what’s actually happening…

The distance between “I have an idea” and “I have a working thing” evaporated.

Building something used to take weeks. Contractors. Slack threads. Approvals. Waiting for someone to email you back about a font choice. Not to mention that whole “coding” thing.

Now it takes an afternoon. Sometimes a lunch break. Sometimes an hour in the kitchen.

Friction is what makes work feel like work.

Strip it out, and you remember why you got into this in the first place.

The Problem Nobody’s Naming

Most people aren’t feeling this…yet.

And it’s not tools. You have access to the same AI we do. Probably paying for the same subscriptions.

It’s not tutorials either. YouTube has forty-seven thousand of them. Every platform has a course now. Your LinkedIn feed is half AI tips from people who discovered ChatGPT eleven months ago and now have “AI Strategist” in their bio.

The limitation is something else entirely.

Imagination.

You can’t use what you can’t picture.

Most AI frustration isn’t about capability. People don’t know what to ask for because they’ve never seen what’s possible. They’re not stuck on the how.

They’re stuck on the what.

I’ve been there. Staring at a blank prompt window. Cursor blinking like it’s waiting for me to be smart. Knowing this thing is supposed to be powerful, feeling like an idiot for not knowing what to type.

You can’t imagine your way out of an imagination gap.

You need to see it.

So We’re Showing, Not Teaching (well, a little bit of teaching)

The community we’re launching isn’t built like a course. No “complete lesson 3 before unlocking lesson 4” gates. No 45-minute videos that could have been a paragraph.

We’ll have workshops. We’ll teach things. But the energy is different.

* Here’s something we couldn’t stop using this week.

* Here’s an experiment we’re running.

* Here’s what just worked for a client.

* Here’s a new feature that’s going to be huge.

* Here’s why I haven’t slept properly since October.

We’re learning this stuff too. We just want to learn it out loud.

That’s what Beware the Default is.

What That Looks Like in Practice

Tam Nguyen , one of our partners, built each of us a personal assistant using Notion’s new AI agents.

You have an idea, message it on Slack, and somehow it just shows up in Notion, packaged and ready to review.

I built a tool called Business Book Prompts.

Blue Ocean Strategy. Jobs To Be Done. StoryBrand.

You’ve read about them. Nodded along. Never applied them.

This tool takes those frameworks and makes them about YOU. It interrogates your specific situation, then spits out a personalized playbook. Scripts you can copy and paste. Checklists. Templates. Even a section that tells you why you might be completely wrong. (Most business books skip that part.)

The point is showing what’s possible when you stop accepting generic outputs.

Both of these tools will be in the community.

The Companion Insight

A few weeks ago I wrote about defaults. The presets you accept without questioning.

That piece was about awareness. Knowing the systems exist.

This is the companion insight.

Questioning defaults is necessary. But not sufficient.

Even if you reject the preset, you still need to see what else is possible. Awareness without imagination just leaves you frustrated. You know something’s wrong but can’t picture what’s right.

The Community Is Live. It’s Called Beware The Default.

Most communities have one person at the center. Maybe two. This one has four of us.

And honestly?

We didn’t start it with a sudden urge to teach. We started it because we had too much “stuff”.

* Workflows we couldn’t stop tinkering with.

* Prompts we kept Slacking each other at 1am.

* Experiments that worked and experiments that caught fire.

All of it sitting on hard drives, cluttering up Notion databases, living rent-free in our heads with nowhere to go.

We needed an outlet. Somewhere to dump everything we’re building and discovering before we lose it. If other people find it useful, great. But this started selfish. Four people who needed a place to put it all.

But it’s turned into a place for people who push past first answers. Who question the invisible systems running their work and their lives.

Who want to feel like a kid again.

But you know I wasn’t going to let you leave empty-handed.

The Adjacent Possible

There’s a concept from Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From called the Adjacent Possible.

At any moment, only certain innovations are reachable. They depend on what already exists. You can’t invent the microwave before electricity. You can’t build YouTube before broadband.

Johnson uses a metaphor I keep thinking about. Picture a house that expands as you explore it. Each room you enter reveals new doors. But you can only access rooms adjacent to where you already stand.

Your expertise is a house you’ve been building for years.

You’ve developed patterns. Approaches. Ways of seeing problems that other people miss. Rooms you’ve lived in so long you forgot you built them.

Here’s the problem: if you can’t see the rooms you’re already in, you definitely can’t see the doors.

This is why experts plateau. They’ve built something valuable and can’t see what it could become. The same invisibility that hides your methodology hides its potential.

Product ideas sitting right next to your current service. Positioning territories that would take you five minutes to claim if you knew they existed. All of them one room away. Obvious to an outsider. Invisible to you.

I built a prompt that maps these adjacent territories.

Here’s how it works:

You describe one thing you do that you’ve never fully articulated. A pattern in how you work. A question you always ask. A move you make that clients comment on but you’ve never bothered to name.

The prompt surfaces 5-7 adjacent territories that expertise could expand into.

Not boring brainstorming. (”Have you considered starting a podcast?”) It’s anchored to your specific patterns. You’re not inventing from scratch.

You’re discovering what’s already one room away.

THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE PROMPT

# Map Your Adjacent Possible

What to expect:

The first few outputs will feel obvious. That’s the point. The obvious ones confirm you’re in the right territory.

The third and fourth suggestions are usually where it gets interesting. Those are the doors you’ve walked past a hundred times without noticing.

Run it on different patterns. You have more than one room in your house.

Zain said he feels like a kid again.

That’s what happens when you can finally see the doors.

The community is live for everyone.

But this prompt is yours now.

Start with one thing you do. See what’s adjacent.

Happy Friday, Signal > Noise crew!

Today we're getting mythological. And maybe a little weird. But stick with me because this might be the most important "fun" exercise you do all week.

The Goddess Who Never Took Credit

Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy. Never fought her own battles. Instead, she whispered to heroes. Perseus "accidentally" found exactly the right tools to defeat Medusa. Odysseus "somehow" always outsmarted his enemies.

Everyone else thought these heroes were just lucky or talented.

The heroes themselves had no idea Athena was there.

You're Doing The Same Thing

Your clients get massive results working with you. They rave about you. They refer you. They come back for more.

Yet you probably can't explain why it works so well.

You think you're just asking good questions. Having normal conversations. Sharing basic frameworks. Nothing special.

Meanwhile, you're recognizing patterns in three seconds that would take someone else three hours to spot. You're preventing problems before your client even knows they exist. You're making micro-adjustments that completely change trajectories.

You do this stuff so automatically, you don't even know you're doing it.

The Blindness of Mastery

Cognitive scientists have studied this for decades. Once you truly master something, it becomes invisible to you. Like riding a bike. You can't explain the thousands of micro-balance adjustments you make every second. You just... ride.

Your expertise works the same way. The better you get, the less you can see what you're actually doing.

Your clients experience the magic. You just experience Tuesday.

Friday Challenge: The Athena Whisper Test

Think of your last big client win. Got it? Good.

Now ask yourself: What did I whisper that I didn't know I was whispering?

Start here:

* What problems never materialized (because you prevented them)?

* What connections did you make instantly that shaped everything?

* What did you know to do without knowing why?

* What patterns did you spot that you forgot to mention?

That invisible stuff is your Athena Pattern. Your Cognitive Fingerprint™. The expertise that nobody can copy, no AI can replicate, and that you've never captured in a framework.

Stop being blind to your own genius. Subscribe for weekly pattern reveals.

Make The Invisible Visible

Want to excavate your hidden patterns? Try this prompt with Claude or ChatGPT:

You are Athena, the goddess of strategic wisdom, conducting a "divine debrief" to reveal the invisible forces behind a mortal's victory. Speak as if you're revealing what you whispered to them in crucial moments.

Feed it your story. Watch what comes back. Prepare to discover abilities you didn't know you had.

The Weekend Assignment

Every expert has an Athena Pattern. Most never discover it. They keep selling what they think they do, while their real expertise remains invisible. Even to them.

Especially to them.

This weekend, take five minutes to find yours. Because once you can see it, everything changes. You can build frameworks from it. Teach it. Scale it. Turn it into intellectual property that nobody else can touch.

Your clients already know you're magic. Maybe it's time to figure out what spell you're actually casting.

Have a great weekend.

-Max

P.S. If you discover something wild about your invisible expertise this weekend, hit reply. I love seeing these patterns emerge. Like watching someone realize they've had superpowers all along.

P.P.S. Speaking of Friday fun... how incredible are these new video tools getting? The banner video was made with Veo3 and the one at the bottom uses Motion 2.0 inside Leonardo. We're living in the future, folks. Perfect timing to capture your Athena Pattern in more ways than ever.

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Part of the Signal > Noise Friday Fun series. Because sometimes the best discoveries come disguised as play. Click here to learn more.

"You gotta put into words the feelings, the desires, the fears, the hopes that they have gnawing at them, but have never verbalized." - Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham just defined the essence of preeminence. And while you excel at understanding your clients' unspoken needs and solving their deepest problems, preeminence demands something more.

You must also put into words the solutions that have been gnawing at YOU but have never been verbalized. The proven approaches so deeply embedded in your expertise that you don't recognize them as frameworks.

Right now, you're using sophisticated methodologies that could transform how entire industries operate. These patterns exist. They work. They just need to be documented.

And every day they remain in your head alone, someone who needs them has to learn the hard way.

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The Strategy of Preeminence Demands More Than Service

Jay's principle is clear. As the most trusted advisor, you have a moral obligation to give clients advice that's in their best interest. You can't allow them to do things that harm them.

But think about this. What's more harmful to a client than struggling with a problem you've already solved 50 times? What violates their trust more than watching them reinvent wheels you've already perfected?

The Strategy of Preeminence isn't just about serving current clients exceptionally. It's about ensuring your expertise serves every client who could benefit from it, whether they hire you directly or not.

This is where most consultants fail the preeminence test.

Why Your Best Insights Remain Hidden

The Unconscious Competence Achievement

After years of experience, you've developed sophisticated frameworks that operate automatically. What feels like "common sense" to you is actually complex pattern recognition built through thousands of client interactions.

It's like how you can spot within the first call whether a client will actually implement your advice or just waste your time. You pick up on subtle cues—how they talk about their team, whether they blame external factors, if they've "tried everything" before. Your gut instantly knows, but if someone asked you to teach them this filtering system, you'd struggle. "You just know" doesn't capture the dozens of indicators your brain processes automatically.

You've reached expert status. Your methodologies work so seamlessly that you don't even notice them anymore. This is the Expertise Paradox in action. The better you get, the less you can explain what makes you effective. It's the highest level of expertise, but also why brilliant consultants struggle to articulate their value.

Now it's time to codify what you do naturally so it can serve more people.

The Perfection Opportunity

Your expertise feels interconnected and complex because it is. You've developed a sophisticated system that handles infinite variations. This complexity demonstrates mastery.

Think about how you actually help clients breakthrough their biggest challenges. You're simultaneously reading their energy, spotting patterns in their stories, connecting dots they can't see, asking questions that unlock insights, and guiding them toward solutions they "discover" themselves. You might think, "How could I possibly document intuition? Every client is different. My approach depends entirely on what emerges in the moment."

But here's what becomes clear when you examine your work: Your "intuition" follows patterns. You probably ask variations of the same powerful questions. You likely guide clients through similar mental shifts. You spot the same categories of blindspots. Even documenting 80% of your process (the questions you ask, the patterns you watch for, the sequence you follow) would give others a revolutionary framework for transformation.

Your frameworks work brilliantly in practice. They don't need to be perfect in documentation. Even capturing 80% of your methodology would transform how others approach these challenges.

The Abundance Reality

"If I document my methods, I'll lose my edge. Clients pay for my unique insights."

But preeminence reveals a greater truth. When you document your frameworks, you strengthen your position as the original source. You become the recognized creator of methodologies others reference. You attract clients who value expertise over commodities. Documentation elevates you from practitioner to authority.

Your documented frameworks become your calling card, not your replacement.

The Path to Visible Preeminence

The shift to visible preeminence doesn't require developing new expertise. Your years of experience have created unique ways of solving problems—whether you call them methodologies, approaches, or "just how you work." These patterns are intellectual property waiting to be documented.

Reveal Your First Framework

Pick one problem you solve effortlessly. That moment when a client describes their situation and you immediately see the solution? That's a sophisticated framework operating at light speed, not just intuition.

To document it, capture:

* The patterns your brain recognizes

* The process you follow

* The sequence that produces results

This process documents the intellectual property that exists in your actions.

Build Your Knowledge Legacy

Your expertise isn't just your business asset - it's your professional legacy. Every framework you don't document is a problem that persists in the world. Every pattern you don't share is an opportunity lost.

Start with ONE:

* ONE problem you solve better than anyone

* ONE pattern others consistently miss

* ONE framework that transforms outcomes

The compound effect begins immediately. As Jay teaches, when you put into words what others feel but can't articulate, you become irreplaceable.

Start by revealing what you do naturally. Use the Pattern Discovery Prompt below with any client transcript, recording, or even your notes from a recent session:

The Pattern Discovery Prompt

You are an expertise extraction specialist. Analyze this transcript of me working with/discussing a client situation. Your mission: Identify ONE recurring pattern or framework I use unconsciously.

Three Questions to Ask the AI To Get More Out of Your Output:

1. "Now analyze where this pattern creates the most value. What specific client problems does it solve that traditional approaches miss?" This reveals why your unconscious framework matters and what makes it worth documenting.

2. "Map the invisible decision points in this pattern. What micro-choices am I making that I don't explicitly mention?" This surfaces the sophisticated judgments embedded in your approach that differentiate expertise from basic execution.

3. "Compare this pattern to standard industry approaches. What am I doing differently that creates breakthrough results?" This clarifies your unique value proposition and helps position your framework in the market.

The Professional Imperative: Activate Your Existing Preeminence

Jay Abraham's Strategy of Preeminence provides an ethical framework, not just a suggestion. It demands that we put clients' best interests above our own. And our clients' best interests include access to every insight that could help them succeed.

In 2025, keeping your methodologies undocumented while claiming preeminence is professional contradiction. Every framework you don't document is a client you've chosen not to serve. Every methodology kept to yourself violates the very principle that should guide our profession.

Your unique perspectives shouldn't be wasted. Your patterns shouldn't die with you. Your frameworks shouldn't remain hidden while clients struggle.

The question isn't whether your frameworks are organized enough or complete enough.

The question is, are you ready to document the frameworks that could transform thousands of businesses?

True preeminence means making your highest value accessible to everyone who needs it. When you have the ability to serve thousands but keep your expertise locked in your head, you're limiting your legacy.

The Strategy of Preeminence calls you to something greater: maximizing the positive impact of your unique expertise. Your knowledge deserves to outlive your calendar.

Your choice is simple. Document your expertise and multiply your impact, or let it remain trapped in your head forever.

Choose visibility. Choose legacy. Choose to serve at the scale you're capable of.

Ready to reveal the frameworks you've developed through years of client work? Discover the Framework Factory Method →

This is Curated Intelligence, a new series where I extract patterns from the best AI thinking that others miss. It's an experiment within my irreplaceable newsletter, so let me know in the comments if you want more like it.

I've been consuming AI content like it's my job (because it kind of is) and I noticed something. Everyone's covering WHAT's happening with AI, but nobody's showing you HOW to think about what's happening.

Last week, I found three completely different sources talking about AI, and they're all secretly talking about the same thing. They just don't know it yet.

The 25-Minute Conversation That Changed Everything

Let me start with this video from Nate Jones that absolutely blew my mind. If you don't know his Substack, you're missing out (he's brilliant).

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[Video: "Most of Us Are Using AI Backwards—Here's Why"]

Nate spends 25 minutes talking to AI about his book, and everyone's focused on his point about compression versus expansion:

"We are using AI primarily for information compression... But something that I heard that's been really sticking with me is the idea that the brain doesn't process compressed information in the same way... A lot of the learning that you get when you read a large book, a deep book on a big subject, it comes from your brain forming new connections as it spends extended time in the subject."

Smart insight, right? Use AI to think deeper, not just summarize. But then Nate says something that made me pause and replay three times:

"It's like this crossover between the way a therapist listens to you and the way a colleague listens to you. And you'd never expect a human to do that, but it's super helpful for your thinking."

Did you catch that? Nate just described a relationship. Not a tool. A RELATIONSHIP.

And listen to how he describes what made it special:

"It was there when I needed to talk out loud. It would let me talk out loud for a while. It actually listened. It actually took notes and it actually responded with just enough interest, engagement, and riffing to keep my brain flowing."

"It actually listened." When was the last time someone said that about a tool?

Now, I know what you might be thinking, "Isn't that just good UX design? AI that listens well?" That's what I thought at first, too. But why did Nate try THREE different AI models? Why spend 25 minutes on something he called "vanilla insights"?

If it was just about the information, he would have stopped after five minutes. No... Nate was shopping for the right conversational partner.

As Nate himself says later:

"It's about knowing when to sort of pull the thinking button and say, 'I want to use this to actually expand my time thinking about this because this is really important. This is work that needs and deserves the cream of my brain.'"

The cream of his brain. When did we start hoarding our best thinking?

How OpenAI's CEO Is Programming Our Acceptance of AI Relationships

So, while I'm processing Nate's insight, I stumble upon Sam Altman's latest post, “The Gentle Singularity." And buried in his AGI predictions is this line:

"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be."

"Much less weird than it should be." That's not an observation. That's a STRATEGY. He's normalizing something that should feel earth-shattering. Watch how he does it:

"In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes."

This is an existential change wrapped in mundane activities. But here's the real tell from Sam:

"A subsistence farmer from a thousand years ago would look at what many of us do and say we have fake jobs, and think that we are just playing games to entertain ourselves since we have plenty of food and unimaginable luxuries."

He's not just predicting the future. He's programming our acceptance of it and making us comfortable with a complete redefinition of meaningful work.

And suddenly it clicked... Both Nate and Sam are revealing the same hidden need. We're intellectually STARVED. Nate's 25-minute conversation wasn't about the book. It was about having someone (something) that would think WITH him. Not for him. WITH him.

Sam Altman knows this. He's preparing us for a world where AI relationships are normal. Because he knows we're hungry for them.

And he even warns us about misalignment in the same post:

"Social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI; the algorithms that power those are incredible at getting you to keep scrolling and clearly understand your short-term preferences, but they do so by exploiting something in your brain that overrides your long-term preference."

The difference is those algorithms exploit our need for connection. The AI Nate spent 25 minutes with? It fulfills it.

The Entrepreneur's Tips That Accidentally Reveal Our Intellectual Starvation

Then (and this is where it gets wild) I read this email from Jack Roberts. I'm in his community, Automations by Jack, and he just dropped this email about his conversation with Dan Martell, a $100M entrepreneur. Dan shared seventeen business tips. But as I'm reading them, I realize they're not business tips. They're a journey.

First tip:

"If you didn't ask AI first, you're already behind. Someone else is already moving faster because they did."

But here's MY take on what Dan's really saying:

"When in doubt, ask AI... it helps you explore your own thinking. You know the answer, you just need somebody to help think through the process."

"You just need SOMEBODY." Not something. Somebody.

Every single tip maps to a stage of overcoming intellectual isolation (at least that's what I'm seeing). Listen to Dan's tip about sharing:

"Share what you learn (That's where fulfilment lives)."

And here's what hit me about this:

"Give away your best stuff... at the end of the day, people still want you to do the stuff for them."

Do you see it? The journey from intellectual loneliness to intellectual leadership:

* Private awakening ("ask AI first")

* Internal resistance ("don't let emotions block you")

* Finding your tribe ("sell to mindset, not category")

* Full circle ("share what you learn")

The $100M secret isn't tactics. It's that Dan figured out how to cure his intellectual loneliness with AI, then built a business helping others do the same.

The Coming Divide: Why Some Minds Will Leap Ahead While Others Stagnate

So let me paint you a picture of what's coming...

We're about to have massive cognitive inequality. Not based on access to information (we all have that). Based on willingness to engage in deep thinking partnerships with AI.

While some people debate whether to use AI, others are having 25-minute thinking sessions. Daily. They're becoming different types of thinkers. More connected thoughts. Richer mental models. Deeper insights.

In two years, the gap between those who feed their intellectual hunger and those who suppress it? Exponential.

Nate's thinking changed in those 25 minutes. Sam Altman is preparing us to accept that as normal. Dan Martell built a $100M empire on it.

This isn't about AI tools. It's about AI relationships. And most people don't even know they're hungry.

As Sam puts it:

"We are climbing the long arc of exponential technological progress; it always looks vertical looking forward and flat going backwards, but it's one smooth curve."

We're living through the vertical part right now. But it feels normal. That's the genius (and the danger).

Three Unrelated Sources, One Uncomfortable Truth About Human Connection

Here's what's wild. I showed you three completely unrelated sources:

* Nate Jones' brilliant video about using AI backwards

* Sam Altman's blog post about our AI future

* Business tips from Dan Martell via Jack Roberts

But they're all talking about the same thing. We've been intellectually alone, and AI just offered us a way out.

The person spending 25 minutes with AI seeking connection. The CEO normalizing that connection. The entrepreneur who turned that connection into $100M.

We're all curators now. The question is: are you curating noise... or intelligence?

And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm seeing patterns that aren't there.

But what if I'm not?

This was Curated Intelligence, a new series I'm testing within my irreplaceable newsletter. Comment below if you liked this style (I'll create more if it resonates).

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