The Silver Bullet You’re Looking For

Prepping PR boxes for a launch at the oVertone offices - my internal monologue of “please, anyone, tell me what to do” was getting louder and louder.

There’s this fantasy that I’m now convinced every entrepreneur has at least once in their career building businesses. I’ve heard it from almost every person I’ve worked with, and, for me at least, it was a recurring fantasy in my rotation during my hardest days.

“I wish I could just be someone’s secretary.”

“I want someone who could tell me what to do.”

“Is it too late to drive garbage trucks for a living?”

“Can’t you just give me straight up advice? Just tell me what to do?”

Now let me be clear - I definitely don’t think that being someone’s secretary or working in sanitation is an easy stress free life. And that’s not really what the person fantasizing believes either.

What they’re actually searching for is certainty.

Certainty that they’re making the right choices, talking to the right people, saying the right things, hell, even filling in documents the right way! Certainty that they’re spending their time right, have the right morning routine, the right work life balance…ANYONE to tell them if they’re doing it RIGHT.

So many of us become entrepreneurs because we felt such strong conviction that we had some answers - that we wanted to test and try our way through some things - not to do them RIGHT but to ultimately do things BETTER. After a while though, the decisions feel so heavy. They carry consequences that can freeze us in our tracks, or trigger unhealed wounds that we thought we had moved on from. Suddenly our conviction that we could do it better is replaced by a feeling that we literally have no idea what we’re doing at all (in the terrifying way, not the exciting way).

For what it’s worth, this is my favorite moment to waltz in as a coach and sit with entrepreneurs and founders. This swamp is where I’ve built my home, and it’s where I find all my inspiration. I want to dig through the muck of your decomposing inspiration and bring the pieces that matter back into the light. I love showing entrepreneurs how to use those pieces as fuel and fire to find their way through the mud.

Helping entrepreneurs learn how to walk in the muck is my favorite thing to do, and it gets so much easier with the right tools and the right company.

Even with the right tools and the right company, the temptation to believe that there is a RIGHT WAY to do things is so intense, especially when LinkedIn and Instagram are glowing with “overnight successes.” We forget that we didn’t get into this to do it perfectly the first time. When you feel stuck and scared, you just want someone with answers to tell us what to do.

Enter: LLMs. GPTs. Claude, if you’re on a first name basis. Gemini if you’re an astrology girly. Whatever your flavor of problem, there is an AI out there who can get you your certainty and get you on your way.

There is nothing that breaks my heart more than an entrepreneur who tells me “oh, I have a hard conversation coming up, I asked AI to write me a script.” or, “I couldn’t quite get the words right for my mission/vision/values, so I asked AI.” or, maybe especially, “I started using this AI UGC service to bump up my insta UGC, it’s so cheap and believable!”

I know what it’s like to want certainty so badly that you start killing yourself to get it.

In the depths of the hardest parts of my business, where I wasn’t sure if I was going to bankrupt us or carry my entire team through to the finish line, when my husband was trying to convince me to eat cheerios one at a time while I sobbed into my whisky, I would have sold my soul to any demon with an answer for me on what to do. I would have made any deal available for certainty. Real, tangible, instructions that would have guaranteed my outcome.

None of these tools existed in the same way as they do now when I was going through my hard parts - it’s shocking to understand how far they’ve come in how short a time - and in some ways, I’m so relieved that I didn’t have them to turn to. I couldn’t pilgrimage to digital Delphi to make an offering to the oracle.

When it comes to answers, the old adage is so true: You cannot make right decisions - you can only make decisions the right way. And when all we want is answers, direct advice, instructions - we miss the opportunity to build the practice of how to make decisions the right way. We loose our spark, our flavor, our authenticity - which honestly may be a buzzword worth bringing back.

When we take answers from AI, we stop making choices based on our values sets and start taking action based on unverified and unearned authority. And when we use AI to tell us how to communicate with empathy, during hard moments, because we value doing it “perfectly” more than doing it from the heart - that’s when I know that business, relationships, and more are about to struggle massively.

I’ve had people tell me that AI helps them articulate themselves better the first time - that they feel more understood, more clear, and more like themselves. They get AI to “gut check” their communication to make sure they’re saying something the right way. I think that this makes us lose so much more than we gain. If we write into our workflow the belief that we can perfectly word something so that we are understood every time, we have already stopped thinking about the other person in the conversation. One of the hardest things to release for any working perfectionist is that there is no level of perfect communication that produces perfect understanding. The only thing that can move us closer to that world is empathetic, authentic engagement. And AI cannot help us be more authentic. Asking Cyrano de Bergerac to write the love poem will not make the girl love YOU. Instead, it builds a wall you didn't have to build - but now have to scale if you want a real connection.

Feeling trapped by your own creation to the point where you’d be begging anyone and anything for answers is one of the most frustrating and disempowering feelings on the planet. It can be hard to believe that there is a way through at all. But I know from experience that crying into my whisky didn’t last forever - though it did last a long time. Imperfect Step by imperfect step I found my way through the muck, relying on guidance from my team and trusted advisors who had been in my seat before. No one could give me an answer or a solve, but I knew that I could trust them to help me through the struggles of the choices I had to make, and even help me be brave enough to make them in the first place.