Original Insight
“There’s a lot of value in that conversation, right? Like, it’s a mutual consulting call. And then we come up with a solution that we package up. Well, okay, if that takes me an hour — I mean, that’s valuable stuff in there. What am I gonna do, just archive it?” — Lou
Expanded Synthesis
Most high-performers are sitting on gold they’re burying. Every time you sit down with a challenging problem — a client situation you’ve never seen before, a technical obstacle that took two hours to crack, a pricing question you wrestled through — you’re generating unique intellectual capital. And then, almost universally, you close the browser and move on.
Lou articulated a simple but profound workflow shift during the March 5 session: when you solve a real problem with AI, don’t stop at the solution. Take that problem-solving conversation — the back-and-forth, the wrong turns, the “aha” moment — and turn it into something that earns twice.
The workflow he described runs in four stages. First, work the problem genuinely: bring a real challenge to Claude, brainstorm without a script, surface edge cases, reach an actual answer. Second, distill it into a skill: package what you learned into a reusable prompt or structured tool so you — or your community — can apply the same thinking repeatedly without starting from scratch. Third, have the AI write the article: ask Claude to summarize the conversation in your voice, covering the problem, the exploration, and the solution. This is not ghostwriting — it’s you reconstructing and publishing a record of your real thinking. Fourth, distribute and monetize: post to your publication of choice (Substack, blog, LinkedIn), run an automation to repurpose it across channels, and optionally turn the skill itself into a lead magnet.
Why does this matter so acutely for coaches and high-performers? Because your scarcest resource is not time — it’s perspective. The hard-won clarity you develop when solving problems is precisely the thing your clients are paying for. When you solve a problem in private and publish nothing, you’re giving that value away twice: once to yourself (by spending the time), and then again by never extracting it for the people who need it most.
There’s also a deeper psychological mechanism at work here. Most coaches and consultants suffer from what we might call the “expert curse” — they assume that because something took them two hours to figure out, it must be obvious to everyone else. It isn’t. The 45 minutes you spent navigating a client’s platform migration challenge, the reasoning about schema injection versus JavaScript execution, the decision about when to use a plugin versus a worker — all of that is genuinely novel to someone who hasn’t spent the time. Publishing it is an act of generosity, not bragging.
For PowerUp clients specifically, this framework does something elegant: it resolves the chronic tension between doing and building. Many high-performers feel they have to choose between serving clients and building their presence. This workflow collapses that choice. You work with a client (or on your own problem), and the work itself becomes the content. There’s no separate content creation session needed.
The blind spot to watch: don’t let the “packaging” step become a bottleneck that prevents the doing. The goal is a frictionless pipeline — solve the problem first, extract second. If you start thinking about the article before you’ve fully worked the problem, you’ll artificially shape the problem-solving toward what sounds good in print, rather than what’s actually true.
Practical Application for PowerUp Clients
The After-Action Extraction Protocol
At the end of any working session where you’ve cracked a real problem — with a client, with AI, or in your own thinking — run this five-minute protocol:
- Open a new Claude conversation and paste the key output or conclusion.
- Prompt: “We just solved [problem]. Summarize the journey — what the challenge was, what we tried, what worked, and why. Write it in my voice (direct, practical, no fluff). Then suggest a title that would make someone who has this problem click.”
- Review and lightly edit — add one personal anecdote or specific example that only you could provide.
- Post or schedule.
Coaching Questions for Clients
- What problem did you solve this week that took longer than an hour? What did you learn that you haven’t told anyone?
- If you had to teach someone else to solve this in 10 minutes, what would you tell them first?
- What “obvious” thing do you know that nobody in your network is talking about?
Journal Prompt What’s one thing I figured out in the last 30 days that I quietly filed away? Who needs to hear it — and what format would serve them best?
Additional Resources
- Show Your Work by Austin Kleon — on building in public and sharing process, not just results
- Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte — on capturing and organizing intellectual capital
- Insight - Codify Your Judgment Into Skills, Not Just Prompts — closely related: once you solve it, package the judgment
- Insight - Build Tiny Tools That Remove Real Friction — the skill-building step in this workflow
Evolution Across Sessions
The April 2 session introduced codifying judgment into skills and building tiny tools that remove friction. This March 5 insight is the upstream piece: it’s the trigger point that tells you when to build a skill — namely, every time you solve a real problem worth solving. The progression is: notice a problem → solve it with AI → codify the solution as a skill → extract the article. The April 2 session picked up mid-stream; this session supplies the beginning.
Next Actions
- For me (Lou): After each mastermind or deep client session, schedule 15 minutes immediately after to run the extraction protocol. Batch the articles weekly.
- For clients: Build an “insight inbox” — a running document or voice memo collection where you log problems you’ve solved this week, before they fade. Review it weekly with Claude and ask: which of these is worth publishing?