AI polish, not AI slop: why it’s time to publish your experience.
You might have started sharing your experience, expertise and insights regularly with connections and a wider audience on LinkedIn. I know I did. That’s exactly how this began for me.
After three years of posting, I found myself sitting on a scrapbook: dozens of worthy but disparate pieces of text, each one good on its own, none of them yet arranged into anything coherent. The questions never quite left me. How would I find the time to bring it together? What would the publication be about? When would it ever get finished?
That’s the point at which I invested in some AI polish.
What “polish” means #
In the real world, polish enhances the look of something while keeping the character of the original entirely intact. A polished table is still the same table, just brought out properly. That’s exactly the role AI plays here, and the distinction matters, because it’s very different from asking AI to write something on your behalf.
We bring the lived experience: the battle-tested judgement, the context that can only come from having done the work. AI’s role is to dig deeper, ask better questions, and help us think about how to make that experience relatable to someone who wasn’t there.
From scrapbook to publication #
Once you’ve decided to publish that scrapbook, the vision can scale a long way beyond a single piece. You might end up with several volumes rather than one. AI helps here too, by organising ideas, reshaping loose fragments, and gluing them into something that flows.
Where AI slop comes from, and why it needn’t happen to you #
AI slop doesn’t appear when you prompt with originality. It appears when you prompt with nothing at all; when you ask a machine to invent expertise it doesn’t have, rather than organise expertise you already do.
Original experience, insight and expertise, carved out of your own working life, is the differentiator no AI system can manufacture on its own. That’s the difference between polish and slop, in one sentence: polish organises what’s true. Slop invents what isn’t.
Why this matters especially in your 50s, 60s and 70s #
If you’ve spent thirty, forty, even fifty years building expertise in your field, you’re sitting on something genuinely rare: judgement that can only be earned, never downloaded. That kind of experience doesn’t transfer itself onto the page automatically. Left unwritten, it simply lives in your head and eventually, it goes wherever memory goes.
The tools now available make capturing it more realistic than at any previous point in your career. You don’t need to have been a writer. You don’t need weeks of spare time. You need your own thinking, and a sounding board patient enough to help you organise it.
This isn’t really about AI, when you get down to it. It’s about not letting decades of hard-won judgement disappear simply because nobody got around to writing it down.
The practical upside #
Much less of your time goes on pondering or deliberating over a blank page. AI gives you options; you choose. That frees up time for other high-value work, or, just as usefully, a stroll in the park.
Having an AI sounding board also magnifies your authority in an era when information itself has become a commodity. It helps you maintain clarity and keeps your message consistent, page to page, volume to volume.
Don’t let your experience go to waste #
Write it down. Use a little AI wax to polish it. Then hit publish.
Do it while it can still be remembered.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
