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If you have watched even one of my videos, you already know how I close every single one of them. I say the same three things every time:
Be real, be human, be authentic.
A lot of people hear that and treat it like a nice little catchphrase, a warm way to wave goodbye before the screen goes dark. I am telling you today that those three words are the most important business strategy I know of right now, and I believe they are about to matter more than anything else you do, because of the strange new world that artificial intelligence is building around all of us, whether we asked for it or not.
Here is what is happening, and I think most people can feel it long before they can put words to it:
The cost of producing things has collapsed.
It used to take real effort to write a polished email, build a decent presentation, put together a website, or sound like you knew what you were talking about. That effort was a filter. If you showed up looking sharp and sounding competent, it usually meant you had invested something real to get there, and that investment helped people figure out whether you were legit or not.
Today, that filter is gone. Anybody with a laptop and a subscription can generate a flawless email in nine seconds, spin up a slick landing page over lunch, and flood a thousand inboxes before dinner with messages that look thoughtful and personal and are nothing of the kind. The machine can imitate polish now. It can imitate warmth. AI and technology can even imitate the little personal touches that used to tell you a real human being sat down and thought about you for a minute.
So what does that do to all of us on the receiving end of the spam onslaught?
Our brains and inboxes are full. Our feeds are full. Our voicemails and our text messages and our connection requests are full, and a growing share of all of it is manufactured by something that has never met us and never will. When everything looks personal, nothing feels personal. When every message sounds confident and polished, most of them stop meaning anything at all. We have all gone a little numb to it, and honestly, we should have, because most of it is noise dressed up to look like a conversation.
Now here is the part that gives me real hope, and it is the hill I want you to plant your flag on:
The more the machine floods the world with imitation, the more valuable the real thing becomes.
When polished is free and easy and everywhere at scale, polished is worthless, and the only thing left standing is what the machine cannot fake:
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It cannot fake an actual relationship.
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It cannot fake a history with someone.
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It cannot fake the moment when a person who has known you for years looks a friend in the eye and says, "You should talk to this person, because I trust them, because they took care of me.”
That is something artificial intelligence will never counterfeit, and the reason is simple. A real introduction costs the person making it something. They are spending their own reputation. They are handing you the keys to a relationship they spent years building, and that is the whole reason I named the book Can I Borrow Your Car? the way I did.
When somebody refers to you, they are letting you borrow their car, and nobody on this earth hands over the keys to something they love unless the trust is already real.
This is exactly why I am not the least bit worried about the future of referrals. I will go further than that. I believe the future has never looked brighter for the people who are willing to do this the right way. Everybody else is about to spend the next weeks, months, and years getting louder, everywhere, all at once. They are going to use these tools to send more, post more, automate more, and shout into a crowd that has already stopped listening.
While they are busy shouting, you have a completely different opportunity sitting right in front of you, and it might be the best one of your entire career. Let the machine handle the busywork. Let it draft the rough notes, sort the calendar, and clean up the spreadsheet and hand you back the hours you used to lose on things that never mattered to a single human being. Then take every one of those hours you just got back and pour them into the only thing that has ever truly grown a business worth being proud of, which is being genuinely useful to real people who will remember exactly how you made them feel and go tell somebody else about it.
I want to be careful here because being real is not a marketing tactic, and the second you try to use it like one, you have already lost. You cannot fake authenticity any more than the machine can. People can smell a fake, and a polished fake sincerity is worse than no sincerity at all.
Being real means you actually care about the person in front of you more than you care about the deal. Being human means you are willing to be a little inconvenient, to pick up the phone when an email would have been easier, to tell somebody the truth even when that truth costs you the sale. Being authentic means the person you are on a video, on a stage, and across a kitchen table is the same person, with the same values, whether or not anybody is watching.
I happen to believe we were made to be known that way, fully and honestly, and I think something deep in us recognizes the real thing the very instant we encounter it, because we were built for it.
So that is why I close my videos the way I do, and that is why I am going to keep closing that way for as long as I am doing this. We are walking into a world where machines can do almost everything, and that is exactly why the handful of things only a human being can do are about to become the most valuable things you have to offer anyone. Anybody can be polished now. Anybody can be loud. Almost nobody is choosing to be real, and that, right there, is the opening. That is the whole game from here.
So go be the real thing in a world full of copies.
Be real. Be human. Be authentic. I will see you in the next one.
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