How slow it feels to go fast

There is a feeling in the air right now, and I doubt I have to describe it to you, because I think you feel it too. The feeling that everything is urgent. That you have to go, go, go just to stay relevant. That if you blink, you'll fall behind the current, and that somewhere out there everyone else already knows what the next tool is and what it does and how to use it, and you're the only one still catching up.

I'll be honest with you about my own part in that feeling. I am usually the one in the room turning the dial up. I run a business that lives almost entirely online. I use these tools every single day. And I genuinely believe what I keep telling people, that this isn't a question of if AI ends up woven through every part of how we work, but when. So I push a little urgency. I want the people I care about to start understanding this now, while it's early, instead of getting caught flat-footed later.

But a couple of weeks ago, the urgency I'm always selling came back around and taught me something. And the lesson was almost embarrassingly familiar.

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I posted, publicly and proudly, that I was going to spend four hours building something I'd been dreaming about. A "Chief of Staff." An AI agent I could just text, like a real assistant, and it would go do things. I even named her. Artie, short for Artemis, because the structure she's built on has a Greek name and I wanted to keep the theme going.

I had the whole picture in my head. Artie would send me a weekly briefing of what actually mattered in my inbox. She'd clean up my unread emails, the count of which I will not be sharing with you today. She'd unsubscribe me from the newsletters I never read and the subscriptions I forgot I was even paying for. All the quiet, thankless work a great EA does. Four hours, and I'd walk away with my own little chief of staff.

Four hours later, I had a bot that sent me a briefing so basic, so flat, so nothing, that I just sort of stared at it.

And then I did the most human thing in the world. I got disappointed. And then I got busy. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the briefing was thin because I hadn't actually taught Artie anything yet. She didn't know my business. She didn't know what mattered to me, who my people are, what a good week even looks like. I'd hired her and skipped the training. But teaching her properly was going to take real time, and I didn't have it that week, so I let it sit.

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Here's the part that made me laugh, and then made me a little quiet.

That is exactly the lesson I wrote to you about last week.

Last week's whole story was Colin learning that you cannot drop a VA into a business this specific and expect it to just run. That you have to take what's in your head and put it somewhere another person, or another tool, can actually reach. That the real turning point wasn't the hire. It was the decision to sit down and teach. To make the videos. To take the time it actually takes.

I wrote that. I sent it to thousands of you. And then I turned around and tried to skip the exact same step, because I was in a hurry, because everything feels urgent, because surely the AI is smart enough to just know.

It isn't. Not yet, not for your business. And I think that's the thing nobody says clearly enough in all the noise right now: an AI assistant is not a magic answer you summon. It's a brilliant new hire on day one who happens to type fast. It knows everything in general and nothing about you. The speed is real. But the speed comes after the teaching, not instead of it.

So I'm retaking the four-hour course. From the top. Not because the first attempt failed, but because I finally understood what the four hours were actually for. They were never about building the bot. They were about teaching it. And you cannot rush the teaching any more than Colin could rush Judy, or than you could hand your portfolio to a stranger and walk away.

You have to go slow, at the start, to go fast later. That's not a setback. That's the whole shape of it.

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The Install

One small thing you can put into your business this week.

So here's the reframe I want to hand you, because it's the one that finally landed for me: whatever AI tool you're using, treat it like a new hire, not a search engine.

You wouldn't hire an EA, sit them down, and ask them to "clean up the rentals" with zero context. They'd have no idea what you own, how you operate, who your people are, or what "done right" looks like to you. They'd hand you back something flat and generic, and you'd think this isn't working, when really you just never trained them. That generic, disappointing answer you sometimes get from AI? Same thing. It's not a bad tool. It's an untrained one.

The fix is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the same step Colin couldn't skip and I tried to: before you ask the tool to do anything, you teach it who it's working for. Not with a system. With a single page of plain context you write once, in your own words, and paste in at the start. Think of it as the briefing you'd give a sharp new assistant on their first morning.

The framework is just four things you already know by heart:

Who you are and what you run. The shape of your business. The kind of properties, the rough size of it, that you also hold a full-time job, that your time is the scarcest thing you've got. The tool can't write for an overextended operator if it thinks it's writing for a property-management firm with a staff of twelve.

What "good" looks like to you. Your standard. Whether you want plain and direct or warm and detailed. What a job well done feels like. This is the part Colin was most afraid of losing when he delegated, the quality, and it's the part you have to actually put into words instead of assuming it's obvious.

What you keep having to re-explain. The context you find yourself typing again and again. Your town, your tenant situation, the quirks of how you do things. Write it down once so you never have to repeat it.

What you actually want back. Not the task. The outcome. "I want to walk into a financing meeting without that low-grade panic." "I want my inbox to stop being a thing I dread." Tell it the relief you're after, not just the chore.

Write those four down, plainly, the way you'd brief a person. Keep it somewhere you can grab it. Paste it in before your next real ask, and watch the same tool that gave you nothing last week suddenly sound like it actually knows you.

I'll be straight with you about where this stops, because that's the deal I want with you. This is the framework, not the finished thing. Knowing to teach the tool is one brick, and a real one. But a context page you paste in by hand is still you, doing it by hand, every time. The thing we've actually been building is the layer where that knowledge lives permanently, where the tools already know your business because the business taught them once and they never forgot, where you stop re-briefing and it just runs. That's not a page you write in a newsletter. That's the house. And you already know who we're building it for.

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So that's the story this week, and it cost me a little pride to tell it.

The urgency is real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't, and I'm not going to stop nudging you toward this, because the people who start learning it now will be so glad they did. But the fundamentals don't go away just because the tools got faster. If anything, they matter more. The teaching, the patience, the willingness to go slow at the start so the thing actually holds, all the unglamorous stuff Colin learned, and that I apparently needed to learn twice.

Go slow to go fast. Even Artie's still learning. So am I.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole