#116 Be ORIGINAL...Be UNIQUE!

Welcome back to April 2025’s fourth edition!  

By next month (unless something totally unexpected happens), fourth editions will feature our Behind the Grind interview series. You’re going to absolutely love these interviews, and I’m just so excited for the series to take off—

Sorry. When I get too hyped, I revert to corny flight jokes. Won’t happen again.

Anyway, Behind the Grind starts in May; in the meantime, we’ve got a lot of good content for you today, so let’s get to it!

This Week’s Highlights

FATTENING YOUR WALLET 💰️ 

• Hustle Hub: Two Helpful AI Articles & A Couple’s Bathroom Side-Gig

ELEVATING YOUR BRAND 📈 

• An Expert Advice on Differentiating Yourself

• Cool Communicator: Don’t Let ChatGPT Write For You!
  

BOOSTING YOUR PRODUCTIVITY 🚀 

• A Food for Thought on Patience & Progress

EXPERT ADVICE 💭

Who is Dr. Julie Gurner?

• She is “a doctor pf psychology and executive performance coach with nearly a decade of experience working with some of the nation’s top tech and finance executives,” (courtesy of her Substack bio).

• She has over 141K followers on X (@drjuliegurner) and her newsletter, Ultra Successful, has more than 40K subscribers. You can find her Substack here.

O.T.F. 
O.F.T - One Final Thought

Just wanted to say that this Expert Advice goes perfectly with today’s Cool Communicator. Stay tuned!

HUSTLE HUB 🤝 

YOUR SUCCESS:

Be Employed - If your AI-backed job search is coming up empty, you may be making one of these 5 common mistakes.

THEIR SUCCESS:

Be Inspired - This couple’s side hustle makes more than $3M per year. What can you learn from their experience so YOU can be next?

YOUR SUCCESS:

Be Prepared - Agentic AI is coming — what can we expect, and how can we use it to our maximum advantage?

COOL COMMUNICATOR 😎 

Using AI is Great…As Long As You HUMANIZE the Output

You all know how much we love AI here at OTF. From a writing standpoint, it’s so helpful with so many parts of the process that it’s pretty much indispensable. But you know what we don’t use it for?

The actual writing!

Every word you read in this letter, unless otherwise specified, is human-generated. And the reason for that is simple: Humans write better than bots.

I love ChatGPT for research, for organizing or reorganizing (especially if I’m repurposing content for another platform), even for brainstorming or idea-generation once in a while. But no matter what, the end result is always human.

Sadly, too many people don’t take this same care. They think the bot can do all the work for them, and the product will come out great. But they’re wrong, because for content to be great, it needs authenticity. Originality.

Humanity 🤝 

Students are getting caught AI-plagiarizing more and more often, and now apparently Gen Z has found clues to distinguish between AI and human writing (crazy!). If it’s this easy for people to spot, then it’s not good writing! It’s predictable and lacks style and personality.

Now, I’m not saying don’t use AI. I love AI. I use it every day. What I am saying is, you must humanize the output if you’re going to incorporate it in your content.

Here are three tips from a former professor of mine - one who’s officially joining the OTF team in the near future! - about how you can do just that:

1. ADD STORIES - AI can generate anecdotes if you prompt it to, but they often suffer from the same issues as the rest of the output: they’re bland, with unoriginal structure and robotic prose. Sharing your personal experiences to create an emotional connection with your reader is a great way to boost the quality of your content because bots can’t fake authentic human experience.
   

2. FOCUS ON YOUR AUDIENCE - You can prompt the bot with some details about your readers, but only you truly know what they’re looking for. Because only you can put yourself in their shoes. This means your examples, word choices, and the like will always be better than AI’s.
   

3. MAKE IT YOURS - If dry, textbook-ish, overly informative writing is what AI produces, make revisions to achieve the opposite! Don’t worry about “correctness;” worry about uniqueness. Talk the way you talk. Break paragraphs where you think they should be broken. Insert italics or emojis or humor or slang.

If AI’s going to do your writing, then you have to play editor. You need to go through the AI draft and do whatever it takes to humanize it. These three tips are a great place to start.

O.T.F. 
O.F.T - One Final Thought

Nobody wants to read AI-generated writing, and if they did, they wouldn’t come to you for it. They’d go straight to the source. But your job, your X followers, etc. want you. Your opinions, your experiences, your words, your style. AI may be able to get you to the home stretch, but it’s up to you to take it across the finish line!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT 💡 

Before You Go!

Thanks for joining us for another edition of OTF. This one was a bit of a wild-card since, as mentioned above, fourth editions moving forward will focus primarily on Behind the Grind interviews.

Funnily enough, next week is ANOTHER wild-card edition, since April this year has five Tuesdays. But unlike today’s, next week’s will be used to introduce NEW, never-before-seen content sections. We hope you enjoy!

In the meantime, let your voice be heard in our Community Poll on your way out!

Community Poll 📊 

Last Week’s Poll Results:

What do you value more right now? (3,652 subscribers)

• Material things I can flex - 0%

• Experiences baby! - 69%

• Stashing money away - 31%

• Honestly? I don’t even know 😅 - 0%

See you next Tuesday 🤝 

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