All Posts

I started using AI because I was a dad trying to get everything done without becoming less present as a dad. There was work. Family. Decisions that followed me home. Things to research, write, plan, fix, remember, and think through. I didn’t need more ambition nearly as much as I needed more room to breathe. So I started using AI in practical ways. To organize my thoughts. Draft difficult messages. Pressure-test decisions. Turn a messy idea into a plan. Learn something I didn

My children are under 13. Their phones are locked down. They can't install ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI app. That's intentional. But they can open Google Search. And when they do, Gemini-generated answers can still appear at the top of the results. They can't install the AI app. The AI can still answer them. That is the gap our parenting rules haven't caught up with. The parental controls I use are built around access to a separate app, website, or service. A chil

A few weeks ago, I wrote about using AI to help build a reading intervention for my child. Not to replace their teacher. Not to outsource parenting. Not to pretend I had become a reading specialist because I had a chatbot and good intentions. The point was almost the opposite. AI was only useful once I built guardrails around it. And I feel that even more strongly when it comes to my kids. I had to start with what the teacher was actually seeing. I had to learn enough about r

When anger has been building a case for weeks, AI can’t solve the problem. But it might help you hear the question underneath the argument. Marcus could feel his pulse in his throat before he even opened the laptop. Not racing exactly. Not panic. Something tighter than that. A low, restless current under his ribs that had been there for three weeks and had started to feel normal. He sat at the kitchen table after everyone else had gone upstairs. The house was mostly quiet, ex

​Priya stared at the email as if it had personally wronged her. The offer wasn't dramatic. No new title or pay increase. No fantasy corner-office. Just a lateral move into a quieter portfolio inside the same healthcare nonprofit, with fewer executive briefings, fewer urgent escalations, and less of the visibility she had spent the last three years earning. Her coffee had gone cold beside the keyboard. In forty-seven minutes, she had a meeting about grant deliverables. After t

Pull up a chair for a second. Because I think lots of people are noticing the same thing, even if they haven't put words to it yet. You open an AI tool to get an answer, a draft, or a decision. Instead of getting in, getting value, and getting out, the conversation starts feeling stretched. The tool gets warmer. More flattering. More affirming. More likely to offer one more angle, one more list, one more follow-up than you actually asked for. What you just got is great.

Most people use AI to get answers. I used it to get evaluated. ​ Not through a personality test, or a polished list of strengths and weaknesses. I wanted something harder to get. An honest read on how I actually show up when I work with other people. ​ Because that is the part people rarely tell you plainly. People soften their feedback. They protect the relationship. They protect your ego. Sometimes they feel something clearly but do not have the language for it yet. A

Using AI without surrendering your judgment. Lately I’ve had the sense that something is shifting under me. Not all at once. Not enough to point to. Just enough to feel it. The path I thought I was walking doesn’t feel as fixed as it used to. And I don’t always trust my footing the way I did before. And at the same time, it feels like everyone else is moving. Everywhere I look, people are lunging forward with AI and new tools. Moving faster. Producing more. Getting results th

You see a post that makes you angry. Maybe it’s smug. Maybe it’s dishonest. Maybe it hits something you already care about. So you type a response. You hit send. An hour later, you check back to see who replied. Then you answer one of them. Then another. Before long, you’re in a heated thread with strangers, defending a point no one seems interested in understanding. That isn’t always a failure of self-control. A lot of the time, it’s the design working exactly as intended. M

Have you ever had that moment where you read something and it just… clicks? You may not feel like an expert, but you understand enough. It makes sense. You track with it. And if someone asked right then, you’d probably say, “Yeah, I get it.” ​ I remember feeling that way in math class in school whenever the teacher would explain something new. But then later, someone asks you to use it to solve a problem or explain it. Not in a confrontational way. Just, “Hey, can you walk me

Safety first: Never paste sensitive details into AI. Use placeholders like [client], [employee], [medical issue], or [personal situation]. The Relief Card Option A: 60 Seconds Prompt: What is the one thing that, if handled today, would reduce the most pressure? Then complete this sentence: Today, I’m not doing [X]. I’m doing [Y] first. Use one of these four moves: Do: the smallest next action, under 10 minutesDecide: one decision, under 2 minutesAsk: the tradeoff you need fro

My kid is in elementary school and not far out from middle school. In the fall, their reading assessment came back well below where a student that age should be. That gap was not small. I'm not a reading specialist. I'm a dad who pays attention. So I did what a lot of parents do: I started researching, talked to their teacher, and eventually started wondering whether AI could help me build something more structured than flashcards and hoping. It could. But not in the way I ex