Mostly Human #64: Bob Hired Staff

A negative emotion is useful for about one second.

That's what they tell us every Monday night. One second, to flag that something needs your attention. Everything after that second isn't information anymore; it's just ruminating.

I have marinated in rumination for entire weeks.

The Monday nights are a small group. 5 of us on a video call, working through a program called Positive Intelligence. I have no idea why I was made leader, but I was. Pod 43.

We're in week 5. Or 6. I'd have to go look.

I have not finished last week's work. I still owe this week's.

The other piece is the saboteurs. The idea is that we all run a set of automatic mental habits, and the framework calls them Saboteurs, which I found a bit dramatic at first and have since stopped arguing about. There are 10. Everybody has the Judge, the one running commentary on what's wrong with you, and with everyone else, and with the situation you're all standing in. Then most of us have 2 or 3 accomplices that do the real damage.

I took the assessment back in 2023, when I was about to lose my job and was frantically trying to work out what came next. Then I forgot about it completely for three years.

Mine came back Avoider, 10 out of 10. Hyper-Achiever, 9.4. Pleaser, 8.8.

I remember reading that and thinking, well. That's rude.

Which brings me to this week.

I said out loud that the reason my business isn't further along is that I've refused to reach out to people and ask them, directly, if they want to work with me. I wait for them to come to me instead. I said it like it was a small personality quirk. Avoider. 10 out of 10.

A while later I said I'd made real money last month teaching with Emily, and that it felt like proof the business was working, and then in the same breath, "...but that was one month. I have 11 more." That's the Hyper-Achiever, and it cannot leave a win sitting on the table for more than about four seconds.

And late in the day I complained that my own brand work is half finished because everything else went to other people, and that I was getting tired of it. Which is Pleaser, 8.8, right down to the resentment.

Three of them, in order, in one day, and I never once heard what I was saying.

Meanwhile, the Judge ran the same line all week, which was that I was failing. I wasn't. I came home from a hospital room in Fargo to a week I couldn't possibly finish, and I made the call to let the non-urgent things go so nobody was left waiting on me. That's the skill the whole program is trying to teach. I did it, and then spent the rest of the week telling myself I'd blown it.

Week 5, or 6. First time I've ever done this properly, on any kind of regular basis. It works when you do it regularly, which is a slightly annoying thing to be able to confirm while behind on it.

There's a small thing you do when you catch one. 10 seconds, thumb and forefinger, rub them together, pay attention to nothing else. That's the entire exercise. It sounds like nonsense and it works.

I'm doing one right now, in the middle of a newsletter I'm late on.

Here's what I keep forgetting: I'm the last person to hear what I just said.

We got trained into listening early. Read the room. Catch the thing somebody almost said. Notice the mood turn before anybody names it out loud. Most of us are very, very good at it by now.

Nobody ever turned it around and pointed it at us.

So a woman says, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, that she's tired of being the one who holds it all together. Says it the way you'd mention the weather. Her friend hears it. She doesn't.

She's been saying that same sentence for years. It goes straight past her every time, because listening is a thing she does for other people. It was never on the list of things she does for herself.

You're not going to find out what's wrong by thinking harder about it.

You already said it out loud. Probably this week.

Go back and hear it.

Three this week. If you're new here, this is where I share the stuffs I encountered on the interwebs that touch, move, inspire, or simply make me snort-laugh.

Choose peace (1:34)
Mature, healed, high value, successful, and magnetic. I can think of worse labels to be called. Dunno if I can lay claim to any of them, but I'm working on the healing and the success. (I've kinda given up on maturity.)

We're GenX women (under 2 minutes, and Instagram hides the runtime, the mofos)
A lot of what she says resonates for me, though I never birthed any children, so there are probably things in here I'll never fully get. And frankly, I'm okay with that.

A living beastie (under 30 seconds)
I don't think I'd ever actually seen a sable as a living beastie. And it makes me sad saying that.

Three tools got my life wrong in 48 hours this weekend.

Littlebird told me last week's newsletter went out through a platform I quit a year ago. It had watched me talk about why I left and turned that into a fact about my own work.

Claude wrote down "training" when I'd said "draining." Opposite meaning. I caught it on the second read.

And one spent several turns insisting my newsletter has a word limit. It does not. It never has. Said with total confidence, over and over.

None of it was invented from nothing. All of it was real scraps of my life, assembled wrong, by something that had no idea who I am.

So this week, instead of explaining yourself to it, make it go first.

No prep for this one. Open whichever AI you already use, go into a conversation you've already had with it, however short, and paste this in.

Apply it this week
Read it. Find the lines that are wrong and say so, in whatever words come out. Not carefully. Just tell it what's actually true.

Then: "Now rewrite that as a short description of me, under 200 words, using my corrections."

What comes back is yours. Put it in the box we talked about last week, the custom instructions one. Every new chat starts there instead of starting from scratch.

Want to go deeper?
Look at the list of things it said it has no idea about. That's the part no machine can ever work out unless you say it. Add two lines by hand.

Three quick hits, every week. The Scoop: one AI word, decoded. The Skinny: one move you can steal today. The Lowdown: one tool, one honest verdict, from my own use. A word, a move, a verdict. In and out.

THE SCOOP
Memory

Last week we did custom instructions, the box you fill in once. That box is yours. You wrote it, you can see it, you can change it.

Memory is the other thing. It's the notebook the AI keeps about you, on its own, without asking.

It decides what's worth writing down. You didn't pick any of it. And most people have never once looked at what's in there.

Here's why you'd care. This is how a tool ends up confidently wrong about you. One of mine listened to me explain why I stopped using a particular platform, wrote down that I use that platform, and then told me my own newsletter had gone out through it. It wasn't lying. It was reading its own notes, and its notes were bad.

Most of the big ones let you open the notebook and delete things. ChatGPT keeps it in Settings under Personalization. Go look at yours. There will be something in there from eight months ago that isn't true anymore.

THE SKINNY
Three versions

You ask for something. It gives you one thing. The thing is not right. So you try to explain what's wrong with it, which takes four sentences and a lot of squinting, and the next one is somehow worse.

Stop describing. Ask for options.

"Give me 3 versions that are genuinely different from each other. Don't explain them. I'll tell you which one is closest."

Then you point. "The second one, but shorter." Done.

Picking is easy. Describing is hard. You already knew which one you wanted the second you saw them.

THE LOWDOWN
This week: Canva

I signed up for the paid plan a couple of years ago, when I was getting ready to be laid off and going into full job search mode. It started with one LinkedIn header image. Then documents. Then flyers. Then everything.

I still love it, which surprises me a bit, because a lot of what I used it for two years ago I can now do inside a chatbot.

Where it earns its keep now: fixing images. A chatbot hands you something that's ALMOST right, and Canva is where you make it right. That's most of what I do in there these days, along with brand boards and anything that has to look like a real document.

If you've ever used PowerPoint, you already understand Canva. Everything is layers. Once that clicks, the rest makes sense immediately. If it hasn't clicked yet, that's the thing to go learn first, and it takes about ten minutes.

Cost: I pay $120 a year for one person, which is an old rate from signing up three years ago. Today it's $144 a year for Pro. The free plan is genuinely usable and I'd start there. The thing that pushed me over was Brand Kits. Free gives you one, with three colors. Pro gives you five, plus background removal, which is the feature I use most.

Verdict: still the easiest image editor going, and I'd pay for it again.

Prompt Along: AI Improv
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 6:30PM-7:30PM CT (Complimentary)

Prompt Along: AI Improv is my free monthly hour where we play with AI out loud, together. You bring the questions. You bring the curiosity. You bring that one tough problem you've been poking at for three weeks. And we prompt our way through it, live.

Get the invitation from Lu.ma

Brigitte's home, and resting.

Earlier this week she ate baked sweet potato with butter. By mouth. Her hubby was crowing about it, and anyone who read last week's will know exactly why a sweet potato counts as news.

Now we're hoping she gets approved for more medical leave so she can put everything into healing.

A few of you wrote back after last week's, and it was the same note every time. You sat with somebody. You were sure you hadn't done anything. You'd been doing it for years. Thank you for telling me. It felt like we were members of a club nobody would want to belong to.

I said up top that I'm behind on my own homework in a program I lead. I'm going to go do it tonight, and I'll tell you next week whether it made any difference. If I don't mention it next week, you'll know exactly what happened.

Here's what I'd like to know. What's the sentence you say about yourself all the time, in passing, like it's nothing? The one you've said so often you don't hear it anymore. Hit reply and tell me what it is. I'll go first: mine is "I ate too much."

And it's the last day of August.

September shows up tomorrow carrying everybody's plans for it, including mine, which is about half built. Whatever you meant to do this summer and didn't, it moves to September. Nothing expires tonight.

💜

Take care of yourself, take care of each other,

Deb