What I Learned About Myself From 90 Days of Using Claude AI
This is the companion piece to the one I wrote about testing Claude for Stoned Fruit. That piece was about the tool. This one is about what the tool exposed.
I'm writing it because I think a lot of people are going to have a version of this experience over the next few years, and most of the public conversation about AI is either breathless or panicked. There's almost nothing in the middle about what it's actually like to use these tools for a long time as someone who already knows how to think.
Here's what I found
I Don't Need Help Writing
This was the first thing that became clear. I am actually like a really good writer…
I came in thinking AI would help me produce more content. Faster. With less effort. That's what it's marketed for. That's what most people I know use it for.
It didn't work that way for me because I already know what I want to say. < — shocker
After seven years of writing for my own business and other people's businesses, I have a voice. I have frameworks. I have a way of seeing things. When I sit down to write, the words come from somewhere specific. The hard part isn't generation. It's the surrounding work — organizing material, structuring an argument, deciding which thread to follow, handling the admin of getting a piece from inside my head onto the internet.
AI tools are sold as solutions to the generation problem. For me, generation isn't a problem. It never was.
This isn't a flex. It's a diagnostic. The tools that exist are built for people whose bottleneck is "I don't know what to say." For people whose bottleneck is somewhere else, those tools are pointed in the wrong direction.
The realization sat strangely for the first few weeks. I'd been told for years that AI was going to change how I work. And then I tried it and the thing it was supposed to change wasn't actually my problem.
My Brain Runs On Curiosity, Not Discipline
The next thing that became clear was why I'd been spinning on certain kinds of work for years.
I have a list of twenty blog posts to write for my Queens of Coin lead-generation content. I have them outlined. I have them themed. I know exactly what each one says. They've been on my list for months. I have not written them.
For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem. I read all the productivity books. I tried the time blocking. I tried the morning routine. I tried the accountability partner. None of it worked, and I assumed the failure was mine.
What ninety days of using Claude as a collaborator taught me is that it isn't a discipline problem. My brain doesn't run on discipline. It runs on curiosity. When I'm figuring something out, the work pours out of me effortlessly. When the thinking is already done and only execution is left, my brain treats it as boring and goes looking for something more interesting.
The twenty Queens of Coin blogs aren't unfinished because I lack discipline. They're unfinished because the thinking is done. There's nothing left for my brain to want.
This is a useful thing to know about yourself. It means the solution isn't more willpower. The solution is structural. Either find a way to make the work interesting again — by adding something new to figure out — or accept that it's admin and treat it accordingly. Batch it. Outsource it. Voice-dictate it in twenty minutes instead of agonizing over it for twenty hours. Use external accountability because internal motivation isn't going to show up for boring transcription work.
I figured this out because I was using a tool that let me do the interesting thinking out loud, and noticed how completely different that felt from the work that was sitting on my list. The contrast made the pattern visible in a way it hadn't been before.
I'd Been Doing All The Thinking Alone
Most of what I do is solo work. I write alone. I plan alone. I think about strategy alone. Even with collaborators like Rebecca, the actual thinking happens in my own head most of the time. I bring her conclusions, not the process.
Ninety days of using a tool that could hold a question, push back on it, and stay in the same conversation across weeks taught me how much of my own bandwidth I'd been spending on having no one to think with.
I'm not saying AI is a replacement for human collaboration. It isn't. It can't see me. It doesn't know me the way the people in my life do. It has no skin in the game. The relationship is one-directional in ways that matter.
But it can hold a thought. It can return a sharpened version of something I half-said. It can remember what I was working on last week and pick up the thread. It can argue with me when I need something to argue with. It can be available at eleven at night when I'm trying to figure something out and there's no one else around to ask.
That turned out to be a kind of help I'd been needing for a long time and didn't know I was missing. Most of the entrepreneurs I know are working alone in this same way. We're all sitting inside our own heads, generating frameworks and ideas and content, with nothing to push against except our own previous thoughts. It's exhausting in a way I didn't notice until it stopped.
What I Finish Vs What I Don't
The pattern around finishing things took longer to see.
I have a reputation in my own head as someone who doesn't finish things. I started a podcast and paused it after two seasons. I have multiple frameworks in various states of development. The Queens of Coin blogs are unwritten. The website iterations continue.
But when I actually looked at the evidence, the story didn't hold up. I finish meals from scratch. I raised five kids past infancy. I'm keeping a vegetable garden alive in Ottawa. I rewrote my entire welcome email sequence from scratch over a few weeks. I went through fifty old issues of Discover Magazine and pulled the pieces I wanted for my Progress Report content series. When something feels like real work to me, I finish it.
What I don't finish is work that started to feel like performance somewhere in the middle. The podcast didn't get paused JUST because of bandwidth. It also got paused because I sounded bored. I sounded bored because by the time I was recording, I'd already had the thought. I was performing past-me's insight for an audience instead of thinking in real time. The format didn't match what my brain rewards.
The Queens of Coin blogs are the same problem. The thinking is done. The publishing is performance….
This is useful to know because it changes what kind of help I need. I don't need motivation. I need to either reconnect with what made the thinking interesting in the first place, or accept that some of the work is admin and handle it accordingly. The thing I don't need is to feel guilty about not enjoying transcription mode. That guilt was wasting a lot of energy that could have been used for the actual work.
Generate Faster Than I Can Evaluate
Another pattern that surfaced: I generate ideas faster than I can decide between them.
Every pricing decision has fourteen possible angles. Every content piece has six possible openings. Every offer has multiple structures that would work. The bottleneck in my business isn't ideas. It's choosing.
For a long time I thought this was something to fix. More structure, better frameworks, clearer criteria. I'd read about decision-making, build decision matrices, make pros-and-cons lists. None of it really solved the problem. The problem isn't that I don't know how to decide. The problem is that my brain generates options at a faster rate than my conscious decision-making process can keep up with.
What's actually worked, looking back, is letting my different evaluation systems run in parallel. I use intuition, market data, tarot, conversations with Rebecca, gut response, whether something feels right in my body. These look incompatible if you list them. They aren't. They're different filters on the same decision, and when they converge, I move.
This is useful to know because it means the answer to "how do I decide faster" isn't "ignore the intuitive inputs." It's "trust the convergence." When the data and the gut and the cards and the conversation all point the same direction, that's the answer. When they don't, the decision isn't ready yet.
I figured this out partly by having a thinking partner who could help me articulate the multiple inputs at once instead of forcing me to flatten them into a single rational framework.
That mattered more than I expected.
My Real Work Is Cultural, Not Commercial
This is the one that took the longest to see, and I'm still sitting with it.
I came up through online business. I've spent years building offers, writing sales pages, doing launch work, managing other people's businesses, building my own. The frame I've been operating inside is commercial. I make things and sell them.
But when I look at what I actually do — when I look at what I'm best at, what comes most easily, what I'd be doing whether or not it paid — it's not commercial work. It's cultural analysis. I look at the gaps between what's being sold and what's actually happening underneath. The Emotional Economics framework is a cultural lens applied to pricing. The Progress Report series is cultural commentary built from old magazines. The work I do with founders is mostly helping them see the social and emotional architecture inside their own businesses that they couldn't see from inside it.
This isn't something I figured out overnight. It surfaced gradually across ninety days of writing alongside something that could help me see the pattern in what I was producing. The same observations kept appearing across unrelated pieces. The same lens kept being the most useful one. Whatever I was supposedly writing about, I was actually writing about the gap between surface and substance, marketing and reality, what we say we're buying and what we're actually buying.
I haven't fully decided what to do with this yet besides share it hope you sign up for my news letter lol
My business works, the income is real good and tbh my clients are so so good.
I don't have any urgent reason to repackage what I do. But the frame shift matters. I
I'm no longer trying to be a better online business strategist. I'm trying to be a clearer cultural analyst who happens to work in this industry.
What I'm Doing About All Of This?
The honest answer is: not that much, on purpose.
The temptation when you find this kind of self-knowledge is to immediately restructure your life around it. New systems. New schedules. New offers. New everything. That impulse is the same dopamine pattern I was trying to learn about in the first place — chase the next interesting thing, drop the current work, repeat.
I'm using Claude for the kinds of work it's actually good at. Research, organizing, thinking out loud, structural work, formatting admin. I'm not using it to write in my voice because it doesn't and that's fine. I now know that's not what it's for.
I'm batching the Queens of Coin blogs into four sessions instead of treating them as ongoing work. Five pieces per session, voice-dictated, formatted later, uploaded by my fifteen-year-old daughter who's saving money for a friend's birthday party. The external deadline is real because her party is real. That works for my wiring in a way self-imposed deadlines never did.
I'm protecting my thinking hours from execution work. I do execution in the cracks of the day — while coffee brews, between kid wrangling, in the twenty minutes before bed. I save focused time for the work that requires my actual brain. This inverts the productivity advice I've been given my whole life. It's working better than any of that advice ever did.
I'm publishing more from inside the cultural-analyst frame and less from inside the strategist frame. The Progress Report series is the clearest version of this. Sixteen pieces of investigative cultural writing built from old magazines. It's the most honest version of what I do that I've put on the internet… Ill have to work on these now that I mentioned them so much.
And I'm trying to stop trying to figure myself out further. At some point self-knowledge tips over from useful into recursive. I don't need more frameworks for understanding my own brain. I need to point the brain I have at the work in front of me and trust that the rest will reveal itself in the doing.
The tool didn't change me OVS but it did make some things visible that had been there the whole time.
