# On Competition and Convergence (yes, Claude helped me write this up) I missed the deadline. Clief Notes · 💰 Competitions Weekly Comp #8: The Wildcard; "You are the client this week." The competition I'd been meaning to enter closed while I was heads-down on something else, and for about a minute I let myself mourn it. C'est la vie. The easy move was to shrug and move on. No prize left on the table, so why do the work? I did it anyway. Told myself I'd run the competition as an exercise, point it at one granular piece of the system I've been designing for months, and call *that* a win. No trophy, no leaderboard. Just edification. The assignment was literally be your own client — so I was. Here's the part I didn't see coming. Somewhere in the doing, things started to surface. Structures I'd been squinting at for weeks turned obvious. The vision went gestalt. The work got *easier* — not because the problem shrank, but because I could finally see the whole shape of it at once. A big piece of that, for me, was working across a defined information surface — Claude Code, one shared place my collaborator and I both edit and maintain. No more insane piles of files in dubious, hastily-named folders scattered across my C drive. An actual, mutual work surface. The architectural vision I'd sketched at the start of this trip finally had somewhere to live, and it implemented as a real structure, granularized at the appropriate nodes. Wow. Just wow. (I'll spare you the full gee-golly.) So here's the take-away, and it's the whole reason I'm posting: Do the exercises! Do the competitions — *especially* the ones you already lost. Put the work in when the only prize on the table is your own understanding. The deadline was never the point. The convergence was, and it only shows up for the people who keep doing the reps after the whistle blows. Turns out the cure for a squirrel-chasing brain isn't fewer acorns.

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Hi everyone, I am wondering if anyone who is already running an AI agency or doing AI consultancy work could share their story. I am unsure when it is the right time to offer my 'expertise'. I don't feel like I add enough value to be asking high prices for services. I kind of feel like an impostor. What made you comfortable with selling your services in this field, and what advice would you give to someone who is just starting? I have to add that I just finished my bachelor's, and I decided not to continue my studies to spend more time becoming proficient in using AI so that I can sell my services to companies. However, I do not have corporate experience, so I cannot start creating workflows unless I create them for others.