Words are hard. Or at least they used to be.
A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio show while driving. The show focused on bio-hacking, including the shockingly (to me!) widespread use of research peptides inspired by GLP-1s. It was fascinating, but I tuned out until the host asked her panel about other popular trends coming from Silicon Valley.
One guest offered up "intentional friction” (which sounds way cooler when you call it friction maxxing). It’s the idea of adding resistance back into our lives, not stripping it all away. Friction can be a feature, not a bug!
This lined up with a new core value we’d recently wrestled with and then adopted at Datum about writing our own words. Finally, I had some research to back it up!
Our summer of slop
Last June, we encouraged our small team to make a conscious effort to adopt AI tools, from Cursor to Claude. As the weeks went by, I found that one area produced far more drag than benefit: words. So many words.
At first, it seemed worth it!
Legal docs, product enhancements, and quarterly goals appeared without the slightest delay. In the spirit of moving fast, these nicely formatted documents and GitHub issues (all peppered with emdashes, of which I’m a longtime connoisseur) had the appearance of value. They weren’t wrong, but they weren’t right.
Over the course of just a few weeks it became clear that not only were these words dragging us down, they were hollowing out our conversations.
- People who received them didn’t want to read them
- People who prompted them didn’t want to edit them
- People in general were thinking less and producing more
It was tiring, it was dull, and it simply wasn’t worth it.
Why hard things matter
In an era of LLM-generated prose, writing words can feel like a daunting chore. With entire pages just a prompt away, why waste your time staring at a blank screen or piece of paper?
But just like lifting weights, solving puzzles, sweating in a sauna, working through a difficult problem with a team, or performing in front of an audience, it is the act of doing challenging things that produces truly meaningful results. And, yes, even joy!
It forces you to stop and actually think about what you mean, not just get it checked off the list. It's slower. It's messier. It’s harder. And that's exactly the point.
While the individual words might all be the same, taking energy and time to think and write and edit adds up. It teaches patience, builds discipline, adds depth, and promotes learning.
So we decided to snap the line: if you were writing words for another human (a colleague, a user, a partner, a customer), you’d have to write those words yourself.
Aligning our values
I’m a firm believer that what we’re doing at Datum is far less interesting than why we’re doing it, and who we’re doing it for.
As such, whenever we have a real “aha!” moment, I look to our core values to see if they could have helped us get there with more confidence.
Overall, our values still felt good, but something was clearly missing. What our ‘summer of slop’ showed is that we needed something a bit antagonistic, something that might stop you in your tracks during the job interview. We needed a commitment to do our own thinking, to show up with a bit of sweat and grit to the game. So here's the full picture of who we are now:
Who we are:
- We are connectors — of people, businesses, apps and networks. ABCD!
ABCD stands for always be collecting the dots- So you can always be connecting the dots
- We are operators at heart
- We are passionate about working in the open
How we act:
- We find creative answers to hard problems
- We prioritize outcomes for users, customers, and partners
- We write our own words
Exceptions to the rule
We aren’t building a cult (although we might be cult_-ish_ about certain things), and values aren’t set in stone or enforced in any real way. But having pointed and strong values can provide a brighter north star.
For instance, I often use Claude to suggest meta data for my blog posts, or recommend some words to be chopped. My favorite prompts include “suggest edits for brevity and clarity” as well as a blanket reminder from my 7th grade English teacher to not end sentences with prepositions!
But I do think we're at a moment where companies and people stand out when they are willing to keep some friction in their process. To write the first few drafts of that pesky investor update before scanning for edits, or pound out the Amazon-inspired press release that guides your next “big idea” discussion.
"We write our own words" isn't really a rule about tool usage, but it is a statement about our ideals and identity. It reflects our desire to do something meaningful, something derived from experience, from arguments, from listening, and from the messy process of figuring out what we think. Hopefully, when you read something from one of us (on our website, in an email, on our enhancements repo), you can sense that a person was behind it, not just a prompt.
Fuel for action
While the words around us are being produced quite fast, with a similar shape and feel, we'd rather be a little rough around the edges. Or to quote my worn copy of Charles Bukowski: ‘what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
If you’re looking for some guidance on how to strengthen your thinking in an age filled with distractions I highly recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. If books aren’t your thing, the pianist Jonathan Biss recently suggested a hack in his New York Times opinion piece: “Too many dings? Try Beethoven.”
Then maybe write your next blog post, product enhancement, or investor update!
Interested in this topic? Here is some further reading: