A colleague nudged me to finish a task. The note was cleanly formatted. It ended with a reminder of why it mattered and how finishing it would help us. I closed the note with some momentum, gently compelled.
I don’t know whether she used AI and it doesn’t matter. I use LLMs to frame my arguments favourably, and it makes them better. But the experience left me with the question: what happens when everyone is a little more persuasive?
Important projects arrive with a gravity. A well-built pitch that pulls you along is a signal. Now every play for your time, attention, and money can be that well built. Everything feels that intense.
That flat intensity has a cost. We barely navigate our calorie-rich food environment, and persuasion is heading the same way. Every commercial tuned to your deepest wants. The plainer cost is energy: it will take more just to get through the day making decisions. Perceptual defaults are sticky. Compelling things will be measured on the pre-AI scale until we recalibrate. We will keep reading polish as importance.
Receiving
The people who do well will be the ones who can tell two compelling pitches apart. One serves their goals and refills their tanks. The other doesn’t. That takes focus: an opinionated rubric, autonomy, and the guts to decide fast. The environment will reward people and firms who have a system for it, even an imperfect one.
I don’t have a good system. I have a question borrowed loosely from Buddhism: is this chanda or tanha? Tanha is craving, the pull a good pitch manufactures. To me Chanda is the desire to act, the wish to make something well. Will this product or project help me explore, find what’s right, and shape it properly, or does it just pull?
Sending
As persuasion gets cheaper to produce, it gets harder to stick. After turning down a dozen polished pitches, the cost of earning a yes on the thirteenth goes way up. It makes trust worth far more. Once you’ve earned it, don’t spend it carelessly. Keep reinforcing the relationship, and keep reinvesting in it. Share credit with colleagues who’ve joined you along the way. Give customers more than they paid for. You want people to stick with you.
Maybe this only matters to someone susceptible to bolded section headers. My colleague’s nudge was both formatted and trusted. The relationship was a part of it. The persuasion changed what I brought to it.
