How well do you know your own defaults?

I’m an over-thinker with perfectionist tendencies. Left alone I’ll polish the details for an hour and still hesitate to share the thing. Applied intentionally, that same trait is a strength: it’s where a lot of good feedback at work comes from, the ‘you raise the bar’ kind.

We’ve all heard that ‘AI is an amplifier’. The less obvious part is that amplification isn’t always what you need. Sometimes the most useful thing it can do is actually push back, and counterbalance the very instincts you default to.

Picture two people opening AI to help them write something. One’s the over-thinker who struggles to press publish (hi!). The other’s perfectly happy yolo-ing a few thoughts onto the internet. AI can help them both. But the help looks completely different.

If you struggle to hit publish, what you might want is an encouraging editor: feedback on clarity, a nudge to share earlier, maybe even a tool that refuses to keep giving notes after a point, and flatly refuses to write for you. You’re already decent at that bit. It’s going live that’s hard.

The yolo-er might need the opposite. AI pushing to clarify thinking, helping them see it through a reader’s eyes. It’s useful friction, in service of a better outcome.

These are small examples, but when our interaction with these tools is woven into every corner of our working lives, the compound effect really adds up.

And despite AI’s promise of speeding things up, what I’m suggesting is perhaps taking a beat to slow down first. It’s about knowing yourself well enough to find ways of working that genuinely fit, and that get you to the outcomes you care about more effectively. Which is why I’m increasingly wary of anything dressed up as a universal way to use AI. Yes, there are some things it’s better or worse at. But the nuance to this is incredibly idiosyncratic to how you work, think and get things done.

If this resonates and you’re wondering where to start, I’d suggest folding in those old performance reviews, the journal entries about what energises and drains you, the personality tests you did at that leadership offsite a few years ago that were fun and insightful but hard to apply to your day-to-day. Feeding this into AI can help build a richer picture of what’s authentic to you, and help AI do a better job of amplifying in ways that align with your strengths, and pull the other way in natural blind spots.

The same goes for those impressive Claude skills and open-source tools getting shared everywhere. These can be fantastic sources of inspiration, but I’d suggest treating them exactly as that. If there’s something that resonates, try building your own version instead. Someone else’s is tuned to how they operate, even if subconsciously, and the act of rebuilding it yourself naturally embeds your own operating rhythm, even if 95% of it lands in the same place

Ultimately, the better you know your own shape, the more useful these tools can become to you.