The Humble Magic of a Good Story

 

Stories sell.

Because people don’t buy solutions. They buy themselves in your story.

So here’s the trick: don’t pitch. Confess.

1. Start small. Real small.

Not with stats. Not with glory.
Start with your client in their garage, on their couch, Googling “How to not fail.”
Because that’s where their prospects are. Right now.

And people trust people who’ve been where they are.

2. Cue the chaos.

What sucked?
What broke?
What did your client not have figured out?
That thing, the mess, is where the magic lives.

No struggle = no story = no sale.

3. Show the stumble.

Tried the wrong things? Good.
Fell on their face? Even better.
Let your client be human. Because their prospects are very human.

This is not a superhero origin story. It’s a regular person who kept going.

4. Finally, show the shift.

The “aha.” The pivot.
Not “we’re crushing it now” but “here’s how we started climbing out.”

Make it feel possible. Tangible. Like the person reading can reach out and grab it.

And when you do that? You’re not marketing. You’re handing someone a flashlight in their own dark room.

So tell your client’s story. Relatable. Vulnerable. True. Because in the end, people don’t follow brands. They follow people who’ve been there.

And made it out.

I had it all figured out

In high school, I thought I was the oracle of my own future. A teenager, armed with a bad haircut and a cocky grin, convinced I had the whole map spread out in front of me. Straight road. Clear horizon. No detours.

Spoiler: that map was crap.

The truth is, I didn’t know squat. None of us did. We were just kids fumbling through locker hall politics and thinking a driver’s license was the key to the universe.

What I’ve learned since is this: you don’t stumble across some neatly wrapped version of yourself hiding behind a tree. You cobble it together. Trial by fire. Bad jobs, worse decisions, all the moves you thought would ruin you but somehow became the foundation for who you are now.

Every version of me felt permanent ... until it wasn’t. And then the ground shifted, and suddenly I was tearing down walls, putting up new ones, trying to figure out if I liked the view.

Growth isn’t a staircase. It’s a demolition derby. Half-built towers, blown-up blueprints, duct tape holding things together until you find a sturdier nail. And you know what? That’s the beauty of it.

If I could time-travel back to that puffed-up teenager, I wouldn’t hand him directions. I’d toss him a toolbox and say, “Go build. Screw it up. Tear it down. Build again.”

Because that’s what we’re all doing. Always. The job’s never done. And thank God for that.

You’re not a finished product. You’re the workshop.

 

The author at 18 when he didn't know
what he didn't know.

The AI Reality Check: Why Human Oversight Isn’t Optional

 

The shine is wearing off. The balloon’s deflating. After two years of champagne toasts and TED Talk promises, businesses are waking up with the hangover: artificial intelligence without human oversight isn’t a miracle; it’s a mess waiting to happen.

The Great AI Recalibration

In late 2022 ChatGPT was the exciting new kid, and every company wanted to marry it. Fast forward to now: adoption rates among big corporations are actually sliding backward. Not because AI is dead. Because the honeymoon is.

Turns out, when you invite AI to run the show, it shows up drunk on data, makes stuff up about 10–12% of the time, and gets even sloppier the less you watch it. We’re talking marketing campaigns with bogus stats, chatbots handing out wrong answers, and copy that reads smooth but collapses under fact-checking.

One marketing manager confided: they spent $2,000 and 20 hours rewriting AI’s “time-saving” copy. Spoiler: a human could’ve done it faster, cheaper, and with fewer headaches.

The Human Skills Renaissance

Here’s the twist. Instead of replacing people, AI has put a spotlight on just how badly we still need them. Fact-checking (yes, the job everyone thought was boring) is suddenly one of the hottest gigs on Upwork. Writing jobs are ticking up too, because let’s face it: AI drafts are like IKEA furniture. You can get it flat-packed and kind of ready, but you still need someone with tools and patience to make it sturdy.

The winners right now aren’t the folks bragging about how many prompts they’ve memorized. It’s the ones who can take AI’s half-baked work, punch it up, and actually make it worth something.

Enter the Human-AI Workflow

This isn’t the funeral for AI. Far from it. What we’re watching is the awkward teenage phase when AI stops pretending it can “do it all” and starts learning to play well with others.

The smart companies are ditching the human-or-AI binary. They’re blending. They’re building workflows like this:

• AI as the accelerator: crank out first drafts, research starting points, and a buffet of creative variations.
• Humans as the validators: fact-check, adjust tone, align with brand, and bring the context AI can’t.
• Quality control as the safety net: processes that catch AI’s predictable screw-ups before they ever hit the light of day.

That’s where the magic happens.

The Cost of Cutting Corners

The real losers? The businesses that treated AI like a human replacement instead of a human sidekick. They’re now paying for damage control: rebuilding trust, reworking sloppy content, and apologizing to customers who got “facts” that were about as reliable as a gossip column.

Meanwhile, the teams who invested in blended workflows from day one are eating their lunch. More content. Faster research. Better customer experiences. Not because they axed humans, but because they knew humans are the glue that keeps AI from unraveling.

Looking Ahead: The New AI Skillset

So where does this leave us in 2025? The winners won’t be the Luddites clutching their fountain pens, nor the true believers worshipping at the altar of the algorithm. The winners will be the ones in the messy middle: the pros who know how to work with AI.

That means prompt engineering, sure. But it also means fact-checking at scale. Editing. Bringing human context to machine output. In other words: knowing when to trust the machine and when to smack it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

When All Is Said and Done

AI isn’t going anywhere. But the “set it and forget it” dream is toast. The real edge won’t come from who can generate the most words the fastest, it’ll come from who can make those words true, contextual, and worth reading.

AI has already transformed work. The question is: Are we smart enough to keep humans in the loop before the whole thing spins out of control?

Research

 

“It was a long-overdue fly-fishing trip.”

That’s how my ad agency partner Tom Dombrosky started telling his story. It was Monday. We were enjoying a Tullamore Dew at Stan’s. Like we did every Monday.  

“I’d booked a local guide, a quiet, sun-wrinkled man named Ted who had been fishing these mountain rivers longer than I’d been in the ad business.

“We met just after sunrise. The air was cool, the kind of crisp that presses reset on your thoughts. I had my waders, vest, and a brand-new fly rod. I was ready to fish.

“Ted led me down a trail through thick pine and eventually to the edge of a smooth, glimmering stretch of river. I set my gear down and began assembling my rod.

“Ted walked a few feet from the water, leaned his back against a tree, and sat down. Hands in his lap, eyes on the river.

“We don’t need the gear yet,” he said.

“After nearly an hour, I finally asked, ‘So, uh… when do we actually start fishing?’

“He didn’t turn to look at me. Just nodded at the river and said, ‘We’re already fishing. First step is to observe. Gotta see what bugs are hatching. What the fish are eating today. Won’t catch anything if you don’t know what they want.’”

________________________

RIP Stan's and Stanley: Stan's Lounge was located on the Intracoastal and Commercial Boulevard. A quick Internet search found a post from 2011 indicating the building "has become abandoned and in disrepair." Sad. I had many great times there from meeting baseball's Billy Martin to BS sessions with folks from the advertising community. A little more research indicates that in 2014 the place was renovated (rebuilt?) as Kaluz Grill and Bar and that Stanley Stratton, Stan's founder, died in 2021. If I'm ever in the area, I might stick my head in the door of Kaluz. It's probably very nice ... but it will never be Stan's.