Writing with dirt on it

There's a kind of writing showing up everywhere now that says all the right things and means almost nothing.

Build systems. Communicate your value. Think beyond the lesson. Stop trading hours for dollars. Create a better journey for the family. None of it is wrong. I'd nod along to every line. But I keep noticing the same thing as I read: there's nobody in it.

No coach who watched a good family walk out the door and couldn't fully explain why. No parent who thanked you for a great lesson while having no idea where any of it was heading. No afternoon when every court was full, the lights were on, the energy was good, and you still drove home knowing something underneath wasn't holding.

That's where the writing starts to blur together. It hands you the conclusion and skips the part that earned it.

Now read back over everything I just wrote.

A machine could have written it. So could anyone who's spent ten minutes around the topic. It names the right absences, makes the clean argument, lands the line about the full courts and the bad feeling on the drive home. It sounds like me. It could have come from a prompt. There's not one thing in it that proves I was ever actually there.

That's the trap, and I just walked you into it on purpose. It's also newer and worse than people think. When you bring one good original thought into an AI and let it loose, you should assume it may not stay entirely yours. Unless you've changed the settings or you're working inside a protected space, what you give the machine can become part of the larger atmosphere it draws from. Later, someone else asks for something similar and gets back the shape of your insight without the lived conditions that produced it. The lived part doesn't survive the trip. What comes out the other side is the form of an idea with the experience scooped out of it.

So the test isn't whether someone can describe the thing. Anybody can describe the thing. I just did it for six paragraphs. The test is whether you can show me the conversation.

I had one of those conversations a few weeks ago. A player comes off the court after a loss, and he's trying to tell me what happened, and the first thing out of his mouth is that it all went by so fast. He couldn't hold onto it. The serve felt wrong in a way he'd never felt before, like the ball came off the strings as some other ball. His feet were tripping over each other. He kept asking himself what was happening and the only answer he could find was that nothing was working. He could feel that he was too close to the ball or too far from it, and knowing that didn't help him do a single thing about it.

Then something happened while he talked. The longer he sat there recounting it, the more he settled, and the match started coming back into focus. The blur that felt impossible to describe a few minutes earlier turned into specifics. The first serve. The lucky shank that fell his way. The four points he lost right after. The cross court forehand his opponent kept ripping past him while he tried to take a little off the ball and watched it sit up. He went from "I don't know, it just felt off" to a real account of what he'd do differently if he could walk back out and start over.

That's the part the polished summary can't reach. Not the lesson about a player losing himself in a moment. The actual texture of a kid coming back into focus in real time, in front of me, while I just listened.

You can generate a sentence about being present under pressure. You can generate my first six paragraphs all day long. You can't generate that.

So here's where I've landed. The most useful writing is usually not the cleanest writing. Sometimes the useful stuff has dirt on it. It names what actually happened. It points at the spot where the system cracked. It admits the thing that turned out harder than anyone promised. You can feel that the person writing it lived inside the mess and didn't just describe it from a safe distance.

That's what I trust. Not the smoother sentence. The evidence of contact.