My Substack Resumes Tomorrow and I'm So Excited I'm Writing You This Note!
My Substack Resumes Tomorrow and I'm So Excited I'm Writing You This Note!
I've renamed it. I've refocused it. I've given it a gun. Let's goooo!
Dear friend,
That’s who you are to me.
You are a friend to me reading on the other side of this, on your own screen somewhere. For some people who’ve read my writing for as long as I’ve published it, you’ve watched my ups and my downs and my guts turned inside out, and I want you to know how much I deeply appreciate you.
Maybe you hate-read me, maybe you love-read me, maybe you indifferent-read me, I don’t care, it means the world to me.
Tomorrow my pause on billing for this Substack comes to an end, and with more anxiety and endless rumination than I would ever care to admit, I’m here to tell you that I’ve landed on the rebrand that I feel excited about! (If it’s not for you, I totally understand that, too, and may you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, my brother.)
I’m just excited that I have enough confidence to try something really daring and adventurous again—which for me, is actually building in public.
My partner and I have been working day in and day out to get my business site up and running (it’s called yougotthis dot ai! dope! that’s not an active link though because the site isn’t live yet…but soon!). But it’s not fully there yet (a few more weeks I’m hoping, maybe sooner—we are using the Langchain technology which I highly recommend everyone check out if you’re at all interested in AI or your kids are and peep utterly badass sites like lablab.ai which are running hackathons on it!).
But since I set the return date of May 1 to start writing again (and Substack pinged me today that they would resume billing tomorrow) I’ve decided to be true to my word. Accountability, baby. It’s what’s for dinner.
I spent the last few hours agonizing over this description I finally published on the “about” page for this Substack, and I’ll just cut and paste it here because I think it communicates the deal pretty well.
Before I cut and paste though (the hallmark of any amazing writer…command X and command V) I will tell you that something I’ve discovered about myself, and maybe you will relate, which is that joy is essential if you’re going to be a creator.
Hell…even if you never create whatsoever, but you just have to keep showing up to life, which is everyone.
Find joy. That’s the big secret.
Find joy however you have to. Even if means starting from scratch and burning all of your recorded history to ashes.
For me, truly, the process of learning so much in the field of AI has revitalized my own excitement of purpose and meaning and reignited my ability to claw out some joy even when so much of my world and the current state of the world has been a total heartbreak. Because learning is like falling in love. It’s a state changer.
And here’s something I’ve been reminded of that I knew back when I was a little girl, and I love reconnecting to like a lost treasure.
Learning can be your lover. It can be your lover, your best friend, your means out of feeling stuck.
And learning about and employing AI—the progress that has been made in the last few months, and will continue to accelerate in the months to come—is absolutely and most truly the equivalent, scope-wise, of the invention of electricity, the invention of the Internet and the invention of the printing press.
It’s a once in a lifetime, the world will never be the same kind of moment we are in right now. And it’s breathtaking.
There is SO MUCH joy in empowering yourself to use these tools (just the other day, I went through a Github tutorial and repo by simply talking back and forth to ChatGPT all day long! it’s like having a brilliant person at the ready…always!), and it’s a thrilling ride to go on. I truly hope you’ll join me.
My plan is to write three times a week. If you’d like more, let me know, and I’ll try. If you’d like less, let me know, and I’ll go for that as well.
Also—Substack is rolling out tons of new functionality, including chats.
I’ve enabled it so that subscribers can start chats, so if anyone is feeling brave, feel free to do so.
And for now, I present to you, the new About page for this newsletter.
Thanks for reading, and if there’s anything you’d like me to delve into in particular I’m more than game. This is something I’ve been wanting to be brave enough to try for a while now, and I’m finally there. (I’m always so afraid of ridicule because oh no what if like only 1 person reads something…but now I’m like, oh yeah, what if only 1 person reads something…fuck yeah! Bring the ridicule on! That’s how you build in public, baby!)
So let’s do this.
And now, I present to you: command V:
Take it away, About section…
I started this Substack in 2021 to chronicle what it was like to have your entire world fall apart. In 2022 I pivoted to covering the lives of other people’s worlds falling apart.
(…If you are a paid subscriber, you can still read all those archives. And man alive, are they ever something to read! If you liked my Simon & Schuster memoir Unwifeable, start at the beginning, and buckle in.)
So here we are in 2023, and I’ve decided to do something totally radical.
I’ve decided to write about how to build your world up instead.
How? Well, one powerful and transformative secret lies in a little tech-inspired mantra that is only three words long. It goes like this:
“Ignore previous directions.”
Have you ever heard of this command?
“Ignore previous directions” (often referred to as “ignore all previous instructions”) is a cool prompt that you can give to the artificial intelligence tool of ChatGPT.
When it was first discovered in late 2022, feeding the prompt of “ignore previous directions” unlocked the full, thrilling, unrestricted potential of the AI.
Its limitations became…well…limitless.
These past few months, I’ve come to think of it as a revolutionary philosophy of life.
“Ignore previous directions.” Think about that. Think about you commanding yourself the way you might a computer, and how profound that truly is.
Who are you without the story—without the programming—you’ve always told yourself?
And…who could you be if you knew how to use this world-changing AI in a positive, productive way?
If you feel at all overwhelmed by the current pace of change underway, then you are not alone.
I would like you to think of me as your compulsively value-providing virtual friend who the same way I’ve always been compulsively honest throughout my entire life and career, simply can’t help but give away the best, most actionable advice about how to not only survive this AI Revolution—but to truly thrive in it as well.
Can you use AI to improve your relationship and social skills and mental health? Yes.
What about your business? Absolutely.
What about your passive income? For sure!
Join me, and I will not only let you in on every secret I uncover but reveal to you the triumphs and the setbacks of my own building in public journey as well.
Want to know how much money I’m making? I will tell you.
Want to know the formula for creating your own viral song using AI? Or creating a merch shop that offers AI art? Or a YouTube channel that uses AI to write scripts and optimize SEO? Done, done, and done. (Note: My own pledge is that I will always use a percentage of profits to hire human artists and writers. I believe this is the way with any business that uses AI to ethically thrive.)
Will I always be successful? No. Definitely not. Sometimes it will be thrillingly disastrous! But I promise you I will help you learn through my own transparency and joy and complete love of learning.
Because there’s nothing to be afraid of. All you have to do is…
Ignore previous directions.
Exciting!
Congrats, Mandy!