How To Become Human At Scale

The Last Thing You Can’t Download: Humanness

Everyone has the same tools now. That’s the problem.
It’s also the biggest opportunity in a generation.

When I started in this business, having a website was a big deal.

If you had one, people assumed you were serious. Established. Ahead of the curve. Half your competitors didn’t have one yet, so just showing up online made you look like you’d arrived from the future.

Most of those early websites were terrible. Blinking text. A spinning globe. An “Under Construction” sign that stayed up for three years.

Didn’t matter. You had one. You were legit.

Then the goalposts moved.

The Parade of Legitimacy

Every few years, some new thing became the badge that said “this person is the real deal.”

The business card with the raised lettering. The 1-800 number. The fax number, which nobody used but everybody printed. Then social media. Then the slick logo that cost more than your first car. Then the professional video, complete with a drone shot and music that sounded like a truck commercial. Then the email list. Then the company app, downloaded by eleven people, eight of whom were related to the founder.

Each one worked for a while.

Not because the thing itself was special. Because it was scarce. Most people didn’t have it, so having it set you apart.

Scarcity was the advantage. The technology was just the delivery system.

That’s the part most people miss. And it’s about to matter more than ever.

Then Everything Got Cheap

Today, everyone has a website. Everyone has a phone that shoots better video than a Hollywood camera did twenty years ago. You can get a logo for five dollars and a business plan for free.

And now, with AI, anyone can produce a polished article, a clean LinkedIn post, or a full marketing plan in about thirty seconds.

Information is a commodity. Technology is a commodity. When everyone has the same tools, the tools stop being the advantage.

This is not a future prediction. This is Tuesday.

So what’s left?

People.

The Feed Is Full of Nobody

I see it every day on LinkedIn. The feed is packed with posts that sound fine but feel empty. Same structure. Same phrases. Same tidy little lessons. “Here are five things I learned.” “Unpopular opinion.” A one-line hook, a list, a question at the end asking you to comment.

You read them and forget them before you’ve finished scrolling.

Nobody wrote anything wrong. That’s not the problem. The problem is nobody’s home. You can’t find the person behind it. It could have been written by anyone, about anyone, for anyone.

Which means it was written for no one.

Then every once in a while, someone posts something real. A mistake they made. A hard conversation with their kid. A patient who changed how they practice medicine. A deal that fell apart and what it taught them. A story only they could tell.

Those are the posts people stop for. Those are the people they remember. And more and more, those are the people they hire.

Here’s the irony. The parade of legitimacy ends right where it started. The advantage still goes to whatever is scarce.

And the scarcest thing left is you.

Your Scars Just Became an Asset

People are craving human connection right now more than at any point I can remember. The more automated everything gets, the more valuable it becomes to feel like there’s an actual person on the other side. Someone with opinions, a sense of humor, and a few scars.

I know a little about scars.

I’m 23 years sober. I’ve been through bankruptcy. I’ve been through divorce. I’ve built companies, lost companies, and built again. For a long time, I treated all of that like stuff to keep off the résumé. The parts you don’t put in the bio.

Turns out they’re the only parts nobody can copy.

AI can write a perfectly good post about resilience. It has never been broke. It has never sat in a parking lot wondering how it got there. It has never had to rebuild a life from the studs and found out, on the other side, that the rebuild was better than the original.

You have.

If you’re 50-something and feel like your best years got spent on a few hard lessons, I want you to hear this clearly. The things you’ve been through are now the most valuable things you own. Not in spite of the mess. Because of it.

It’s 100 miles into the woods. It’s 100 miles back out. The walk out is the story. And people want to hear it from someone who actually made the trip.

The Problem: Being Human Doesn’t Scale

Here’s the catch, especially for the busy people reading this.

Being human doesn’t scale very easily.

You can’t personally have coffee with every potential client or patient. You can’t shake every hand. A surgeon has a full OR schedule. A founder has payroll, investors, and a team that needs them. You only have so many hours, and most of them are already spoken for.

So the people who win from here on out will be the ones who figure out how to be human at scale.

That sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t.

How to Be Human at Scale

1. Share stories and opinions, not information.

Anyone can explain what a rotator cuff is or how to structure a business deal. AI does that for free, instantly, all day long.

What it can’t do is tell people what you saw last Tuesday. What you got wrong early in your career. What you believe that most of your peers don’t.

Here’s a simple test. Before you post something, ask: could a competitor post this exact thing, word for word, and it would still make sense?

If yes, don’t post it. Rewrite it until only you could have written it.

Information tells people what you know. Stories and opinions tell people who you are. And people don’t hire what you know. They hire who you are, and assume you know the rest.

2. Let people see and hear you.

Video and voice carry things text never will. Your tone. Your face. The pause before you say something hard. The way you laugh at your own mistakes.

It doesn’t have to be polished. Actually, it’s better if it isn’t.

I’ve posted plenty of videos that would make a film student cringe. Bad lighting. Wind in the mic. Me squinting into the sun like I’m trying to read a menu without my glasses. Those videos consistently outperform my most polished content.

Not even close.

Polish used to signal “serious.” Now it signals “agency” or “AI.” A little rough around the edges signals something much more valuable. It signals “real person, probably worth trusting.”

3. Hand off the busywork. Keep the human parts.

Editing. Formatting. Scheduling. Distribution. Design. Thumbnails. Captions. None of that needs to be you.

Use tools for all of it. Use people for all of it. This is exactly where technology earns its keep.

But the stories, the opinions, and the real conversations should always come from you. That’s the part people are actually buying.

This is how I run my own content, and it’s how we set things up for the doctors and founders we work with. They bring the raw material, which is their life, their patients, their decisions, their scars. Everything else gets handled. They spend twenty minutes being themselves instead of six hours fighting with a scheduling app.

That last point is really the whole game.

Use technology for everything that doesn’t need a human, so you have more time and energy for everything that does.

Bigger, Then Freer

For decades, we used technology to look bigger and more impressive than we were. The website, the logo, the video, the app. All of it was a costume.

The costume doesn’t work anymore. Everyone owns the same one.

Now the opportunity runs the other direction. Use technology to free yourself up to be more yourself. More time for the conversations that matter. More energy for the work only you can do. More room to say what you actually think.

That’s not just a marketing strategy. That’s a better way to live.

And for a lot of us, it means the most satisfactory years of our existence still lie ahead. Not behind us, with the fax machine and the spinning globe.

So here’s a question to sit with this week.

If someone read everything you’ve put out there publicly over the last year, would they feel like they know you?

Or just what you do?

Talk soon,
Dennis