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Welcome to the year of authorship

Happy New Year!

I haven’t written in a few weeks—partly the holidays, partly because I’ve been sitting with my annual review and planning.

One big challenge stood out…

The better AI gets, the more I’m questioning my own value.

And you should too if you care about your craft. Not in a “robots are coming for your job” way. In a subtler, yet more annoying way.

Let me explain.

When I can generate a decent draft in seconds with the right context, the hours I used to spend wrestling with ideas start to feel inefficient. And when the output is good enough, it’s easy to think: What am I actually contributing?

It’s a new type of imposter syndrome, and no one’s talking about it.

Everyone debates whether AI will replace jobs or if people using it will, but no one is naming what it does to people who’ve spent years (and keep working on) mastering their judgment and taste.

AI is not making your work less valuable, especially if you use it well. But it is making the most important parts of your skillset harder to see, even in yourself.

Things like:

• Judgment (knowing what direction to go)
• Taste (recognizing when something resonates)
• Sequencing (how you structure ideas)
• Synthesis (connecting insights into something coherent)
• Knowing what not to do
• Knowing when something is good enough

Because AI delivers output instantly, we’ve started valuing speed over these things—even in ourselves. When judgment comes easily because you’ve earned it, your brain discounts it. It doesn’t feel hard, so it doesn’t feel valuable.

Result: imposter syndrome.

This pulled me back more than ten years.

That’s when I started obsessing over persuasive writing. I was hand-copying sales letters, brainstorming hundreds of headline variants for a single page, and letting ideas sit for days until my brain connected the dots to find the right angle.

It was slow. It was frustrating. And it made me better.

When you’ve done the reps—when you’ve felt the difference between a headline that almost works and one that actually does, you develop confidence you can’t borrow or automate.

You know why something works. You trust your taste.

That confidence used to be reinforced by effort. Now AI makes it dangerously easy to discount it.

So here’s how I’m approaching my work and how I will guide all my clients in 2026 and beyond:

I’m reclaiming authorship of my craft.

No one needs more output. And it’s never been easier to chase efficiency.

But confidence doesn’t come from speed. It comes from depth.

To me authorship means:

• Having opinions you can defend
• Saying “this is how I do it”
• Being comfortable with partial certainty and struggling through it
• Letting your taste show, even at the risk of polarizing others

It’s true for a consultant like myself and for a SaaS company looking for their message-market fit in a sea of sameness.

If you’ve felt your confidence getting eroded by AI the more you use it, it’s because you’ve been skipping the deep work that earns certainty.

Earned certainty kills imposter syndrome.

So, I’m coining “MWHA”: Make Writing Hard Again.

Not forcefully hard, but intentionally and with just enough friction in the right places:

• Writing initial drafts without AI
• Letting ideas sit longer instead of rushing to resolution
• Refusing to settle for the first, second, or third AI output
• Handwriting copy and journaling regularly
• Obsessing over curating context for AI (this is a real skill now)
• Debating AI on strategy and direction, not just asking it to comply
• Putting even more care into editing and revision

I’m also committing to sharing more of the invisible work—the judgment calls, the taste decisions, the “here’s why I chose this” breakdowns on Youtube and on the podcast.

If the invisible parts of our value are getting harder to appreciate, the answer is to make them somehow costly, hence visible again.

The answer isn’t to rely on AI blindly. And it isn’t to reject it either.

The ones who win, remember that craft is about developing taste, building certainty, and trusting that the invisible work is exactly what makes you irreplaceable.

Here’s to a year of authorship.

RESONANCE

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Chris

Chris Silvestri Founder & conversion alchemist

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