Someone asked a question in a company Slack channel that wasn't addressed to me, and it sent me off to Perplexity asking what I could actually do about the environmental cost of using AI constantly. I made a few changes that week and forgot about it. Eleven months later I went back and checked which ones survived, and found that the habit I'd dropped was the wrong one, the habit I kept religiously does nothing at all, and the two changes that genuinely mattered were ones I'd

I've watched the same AI training get built more than once now, in more than one place. The content is usually fine. People walk out able to tell you the difference between a vague prompt and a specific one, and then nothing changes on Tuesday. What people are missing isn't knowledge. Here's what actually moved people, and why one slide did more than a full curriculum.

There was a conversation I needed to have with another program manager, and I kept not having it. He didn't report to me, he was good at the job, and I didn't want to spend the working relationship badly. So I practiced it first, against a Gem built to play him. It pushed back the way he pushes back, told me exactly where I was hedging, and by the time I sat down with the real person, nothing in it was a surprise. Full prompt at the bottom of the post.