Last week's edition got 375 clicks.
A typical one gets about 85.

I would like to tell you the writing was better. It wasn't. The difference was Helene.

She's 72, an executive coach and management consultant, and she was on camera talking about her own life in her own words. That was the whole variable.

Which is exactly why I'm having her back. This Thursday we're on together, live, and we're both going to show how we're using Life By Decade to put our own life stories somewhere they can be shared.

So here's what I keep noticing. AI made content infinite. It did not make attention infinite. When anything can be generated, the only thing still worth someone's time is the thing that couldn't have come from anywhere else.

Helene had been keeping her life story in a Word document. By hand, decade by decade. She hadn't told anyone she was doing it.

I didn't know that when we started recording. No AI was going to hand me that detail, because it only existed in one person.

When I cut the footage down, everything I could have written myself went. The explanations, the reasons someone might find the app useful, all of it accurate and all of it replaceable. What stayed was Helene saying she isn't going to be here forever, so she might as well capture it.

That's the filter, and you can run it on whatever you're working on today. Read the sentence you just wrote and ask yourself whether anything else could have produced it. If a competent machine could have, it's furniture. Keep the part nobody else could have said.

I built Life By Decade because I wanted to see my own life laid out by decade, with the pictures attached to the moments they belong to.

Photos alone don't do it. I have thousands of them, on the phone, on the computer, in boxes in the closet, and nobody is going to go through them.

I've never shown my timeline to anyone. On Thursday I will.

That's Life By Decade LIVE!, and this is your last call.

Helene and I are on together again, but this time LIVE on Thursday, September 24, at 1:00 PT / 4:00 ET. She'll walk through her timeline in her own words. She's unstoppable! Her timeline now has 69 life events and more than 250 photos.

We'll also build a timeline from scratch so you can see how it works. And we'll take your questions live.

It's free. Sign up now rather than Thursday morning. The link comes by email and I want it to reach you in time.

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Don't die with your life story still stuck inside you. Yours is the one nobody else can tell.

— Jon