Why Your AI Needs Your Mistakes (To Finally Sound Like You)

I was having a conversation with Carol, one of the members of my community, who does product management. One of the things she thought AI could help her with was just email because she just really doesn’t like writing email.

Sometimes, rather than finding the highest value thing, it can just be finding the thing which sucks. I was like, have AI do the work, you know, like doing, make your life easier and nicer. But you still want a good result out of it because you don't want to do poor work.

The core challenge is this: You want it to seem like you, because for the most part, people are assuming that you're actually writing your emails. But if you don't like writing them, how do you get it so that AI will write similar to with your voice?

The Flawed Approach: Just Saying "Write Like Me"

Most people when they’re working with an AI to try to get it to write like them, they typically just ask it that: "write like me." They may even give an example of a past email they’ve written.

But you almost never get a good result like that. It's not the right solution. You’re going to get something where you just have to go and have to revise it a lot.

The core of our simple approach is that the number of things you need in terms of context is usually a lot larger than you think in order to get a consistent result.

Your Secret Ingredient: The Long-Form Piece

You need to define your authentic style. You can’t do this with a single sentence or a short paragraph.

Your first step is to find some piece of writing that you’ve done that’s quite long—at least a few pages would be ideal. This needs to be your writing. Stay away from marketing—things that have been through copywriters or editors. You just want your genuine language.

This long-form writing is your secret ingredient. It contains the true DNA of your communication style, the way you structure arguments, and your unique phrasing.

The Critical Step: Analyzing Your Style

Once you have your long-form piece, you’re going to feed it into the AI and you’re going to ask it to describe the writing for you.

This is the important part: The description that it does for you should be about a half a page, maybe ten lines or something about how to describe how you write.

What you’re really looking for here are two things that make your writing you:

1. The Overall Style: The AI might point out that you write in a very direct way, or you’re too verbose. You can then refine this description to what you want it to be.
2. Your Mistakes: This is the most telling part. The language is just way too clean for what any person would do. You want to look for things that make it more authentic.

Ask the AI this question: "What mistakes do I typically make? How do I say things which is not very typical?"

If you have a common misspelling, an unusual phrase (like using "irregardless"), or a specific structure, that’s gold. That's who you are, and that will help to make people think that the email was written by me and not by AI.

Lock in Your Voice: The Refinement Stage

Once you have your full style guide—the four or five tell-tale signs, your mistakes, and a few examples of past emails—you’ve built the necessary context.

You typically will get a very good result right out of the gate. But you can't just pass it in and say, "okay, I'm done."

The real secret is in the refinement stage. You send out the email, and for the next one, you go back through and you try to look and see what it didn't hit.

Then you refine your instructions—what is your style of writing—and over time, by the fifth or sixth version, it’s going to really lock in very well what your style is.

Stop Fumbling with Words. Get to the Idea.

The goal isn't just to write faster. The goal is to get to the idea. You have an idea that you want to get across, and then you have to use these very clumsy things called words to like get the idea across.

If AI can help you get much closer to the idea that you originally had, then that’s the goal. That's the most important part of the simple approach.

If you’d like to stop fumbling with words and start getting to the idea immediately, you need a simple guide to build this repeatable way of working.

Start the 7-Day Challenge now to build the blueprint for your authentic voice.