Mercury has stationed direct, and clarity came like a lightning bolt. As a founder, as a speaker, and as someone who’s built a service-based business, I have a lot of love for founders. I’m part of this group. That isn’t going anywhere, but the scope is expanding.

The shift in Seed & Society®, and in me, has to come from what I’m experiencing in my everyday life.

For nearly two decades I’ve been in the workforce as an employee. And still am. And plan to be in this sphere for years to come. What I like about it is that I get to work with interesting people on interesting problems. In my current role I’m genuinely encouraged to use A.I., and I get to help drive adoption inside large organizations so that people’s worlds work better.

I 10xed my income in three years, and it happened inside a job. People ask me about that more than almost anything else I’ve done. So no, this isn’t just a founder thing. It’s a working-human thing.

I also see the limit clearly. When you’re handling million-dollar clients, or initiatives that touch thousands or millions of people, it still takes a team. That is not something one person does alone, even with A.I. employees. Which is exactly why the professionals who get good at this become rare. They don’t just make themselves better, they make the whole team better.

And here’s something I want to be honest about, because a lot of online business advice isn’t. Building a business isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not for everybody. Looking at the numbers, it’s usually the much harder route. The Census counted 27.2 million American businesses with no employees, and $1.3 trillion in receipts between all of them. Do that division: the average is about $48,000 a year. In the Census receipts data, roughly 13% of those businesses clear six figures, and about 0.4% clear a million.

Those numbers aren’t a warning, and they’re not me talking anybody out of building a business. I built one, on purpose, and I’m still building it. But if you’re in a role that pays you well, with people you like, working on problems that interest you, you are not behind. You’re already holding the thing most businesses spend years reaching for.

I’m a data and social scientist, so I ran the numbers, and the impact. The people I actually help a lot are the ones employed by companies, and most of my audience is in corporate. I even sit on the board of Per Scholas Philadelphia, a workforce development nonprofit that provides no-cost, A.I.-enabled technology training so adults can get jobs in tech. And until now I was ignoring them with my content. That stops today.

This is about congruence and impact. Seed & Society® serves professionals, teams, and founders. So my advisory is expanding: what was only Business Advisory is now Career & Business Advisory. Career Advisory helps you become A.I.-native in your work and your next move. Business Advisory helps founders build an A.I.-native company on a Business Brain. Same method underneath, same three steps: we find the gap, we build the foundation, we use it on real work. Built with you, owned by you. Organizations bring Context Training™ to their teams.

How to teach your A.I. the job you actually have

Here’s what almost everybody actually does. They open a chat, ask a question cold, and wonder why the answer is technically fine and largely unusable by them without a lot of editing.

Pasting in your job description would be a real step up, and most people never even do that. But a job description is still only the beginning, because it’s what the role was advertised as, not the job you actually have. Nobody’s job description mentions the person whose approval actually unblocks things, or the format your director prefers and has never said out loud, or the sentence you always cut before you hit send.

Context Training™ builds the foundation your A.I. reads before it does anything: your goals, your voice, your standards, your examples, and the world the work belongs to. Five things.

For a founder, that context is the business. For a professional, it’s the role. And if you’re a founder with a team, you need the role version too, because that is exactly what you hand a new hire so they’re useful in week one instead of month three. It’s the same work at two altitudes. Here’s what each of the five means when the thing you’re teaching it is a job.

Goals. Not the company’s mission. What you are personally measured on this quarter, and what you want next. An A.I. that knows you’re trying to move from doing the work to leading it will make different suggestions than one that thinks you just want tasks finished faster.

Voice. How you actually write at work. Paste in at least three things you really sent. That teaches more than any adjective you could pick.

Standards. What “good” means on your team, or in your business, specifically. Not good in general. The length people actually read, the level of detail your leadership expects, what gets a document sent back.

Examples. The best version of each thing you produce. One strong weekly update beats a paragraph describing what a weekly update should be.

The world the work belongs to. Who else is in the room. What your team is judged on. The politics, the constraints, the history of the thing you’re walking into. This is the one almost everybody leaves out, and it’s something that separates output you can send from output you have to rewrite.

Two things that will save you months. First, this is curation, not accumulation. Dumping every document you own into a chat makes the output worse, not better. Pick the sharpest example of each thing, not all of them.

Second, keep it in files you own, not buried in a chat history inside one company’s tool. Roles change. Tools change. Employers change. A foundation you own moves with you to every one of them, and it is the closest thing to portable career equity I know of.

Here’s the test for whether you’ve done it right. Ask it to draft the thing you least like writing. If what comes back is something your manager would read and never once wonder who wrote it, the foundation is working. If it still sounds like a stranger, something on that list of five is missing, and it’s usually the last one.

Two six-figure A.I. jobs and a TEDx stage

Something this newsletter now does on purpose: real A.I. jobs. Both of these are six figures, neither is a technical role.

This Week on the Podcast

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