Both of my children were born by C-section. Both times, I was in the hospital bed with a laptop, sending emails to clients. Before my epidural even wore off. That’s how I was able to respond, because after it wore off, I felt like I’d been hit by two Mack trucks.

With my daughter, I was technically a contractor. No paid time off. I had just brought a life into this world, and I didn’t feel like I could risk my job or risk the delayed responses. I went back to work two weeks after giving birth. I still remember being at the computer with a baby on my chest as I breastfed. With my son, I had twelve weeks of leave on paper. He came early, and I was still answering emails from that bed. Both of my children went to the NICU. And I was responding to emails while my children were in the NICU.

I’m interrogating a belief I’ve carried for years, the one that says I need to always be exceptional, and that if I don’t do all of the things, all of the time, I won’t hit my goals. That’s scarcity thinking, and stories like those are its receipts.

Nobody hands out a trophy for answering emails from a hospital bed. The work got done, and it cost me moments I don’t get back, like my daughter’s first day of school ever. Yes, I saw the pictures. But I had meetings and I had work.

So here’s the commitment I’m making, out loud so y’all can hold me to it. Health is the priority. It’s what every other aspect of your life stands on. I’ve felt the stress of this season in my body, and I’m done ignoring it. I’m committing to my fitness and dialing even more in on my nutrition.

And Saturday showed me what the other side looks like. I went to an A.I. Collective meetup in Chattanooga. A Saturday afternoon in the thick of summer, 80 degrees, people out on the river paddleboarding. And still, 40 adults filled every seat at a free event to spend four hours in a room building agents together. I almost didn’t go. I was tired and overwhelmed, and my husband, thank God for him, pushed me out the door: it’s for the connections, for being around other people who are into the thing you’re into.

He was right. The room ran the whole gamut, deeply technical folks building their own A.I. systems next to total beginners. A woman with grown kids came to build an agent that gives her quick recipe ideas for cooking for her husband. Someone in a job search built an agent that scrapes the roles worth applying to, so she can write the resume and cover letter herself, because, as she put it, the human ones get her the interviews. People drove in from Atlanta for knowledge other folks charge thousands for.

And I left with something new to learn. I talk about sovereignty, asset-based thinking, owning your data, and I’d been doing everything inside the same two tools. Saturday I downloaded a different harness (the app your A.I. actually runs in) and connected one sign-in that opens 200+ models. I became an expert in one tool on purpose (Claude), went deep, and built really cool stuff with it. Now I get to be a beginner again, and I’m excited about that. It also sharpened the exact thing this issue is about: the tools will keep changing. What’s mine is the context.

Your context is an asset

Here’s a question worth sitting with: if the A.I. platform you use every day changed its rules tomorrow, raised prices, sunset your plan, got acquired, how much of what it knows about your business would you get to keep?

For most owners, the honest answer is none of it. Hundreds of chats deep, every correction, every preference, every “no, say it like this,” all of it living in someone else’s building. That’s renting intelligence. And renting the intelligence is fine! I rent the models too, they’re the best they’ve ever been. What I refuse to rent is the context.

My business’s context, who I help, how I sound, what I sell, what’s true for my business right now, my prices, my real stories, my rules, my past posts, my podcast scripts, lives in plain files I own. Any A.I. can read them, and every A.I. employee I have runs on them. The same files let one employee write the blog, another produce the podcast, another draft this newsletter, another find grants, another pitch me for stages. That blog employee drove the bulk of the 10,000 visitors my site did this month. One set of files, a whole team of jobs.

And I’ve stress-tested this for real. Y’all watched me move this newsletter from Beehiiv to Kit last month. New platform, and my A.I.’s knowledge of my business never blinked, because that knowledge was never theirs. It moved with me, the same way it’ll move through every tool change still coming.

And the tool side is moving faster than most owners realize. This weekend I connected Nous Portal, one sign-in that opens the door to more than 200 models, and next I’ll be exploring OpenRouter. Let me say this plainly: there are 200+ models out there, many of them free, like Nvidia’s, and some, like DeepSeek, that cost pennies next to the big names. Most of y’all have only ever used ChatGPT or Claude. Seven billion people in the world have never used any. The opportunity is astronomical, and these models won’t be subsidized for long. Prices will move, models will come and go, and the winners will change. You can’t control any of that. What you can control is whether your business’s context is ready to move with you when it does.

This is asset-based thinking, the same lens I’ve built everything else on, applied to the newest thing on the balance sheet. Your business’s context is an asset. It appreciates every time you refine it, it’s portable across every tool, and it outlives any platform’s pricing page. Context Training™ is how you build the asset. Ownership is why it’s worth building.

A grants portal and a stage

Speaking is the most underpriced revenue stream most of you have. Cash grants and a speaker call, all verified this week.

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