I'm guilty of slop.

Since the beginning of last year, I embarked on the adventurous journey of content creation. In my case, the idea was a newsletter to explore the interconnections between climate change and technology.

Last week, I sent my fiftieth email to a list of a few hundred people I've built mostly thanks to my professional network and new, interesting connections. But over this year and a half, I noticed that the time and the effort spent on producing content that I can be proud of has slowly diminished until a point where I was relying more on AI-generated inputs rather than my own.

I fell into that pit called "slop", the pile of sh*t where the majority of the content you see on social networks and the web ends up after a few scrolls. Most of the content out there is now generated by a chatbot or copied and pasted from someone else, sometimes without even the minimal effort of changing the wording a bit to make it sound different or more original.

I try to remind myself every day that nothing is better than slop, but is hardly avoidable if you want to put out content on a frequent basis (e.g., daily or weekly) when content creation is not your full-time job or your main concert.

So, what am I trying to do to prevent slop? I feel that the effort to produce something actually meaningful and useful requires a lot of intentionality, deliberate practice, and a good dose of intuition.

This is how I would describe the three ingredients I just mentioned:

1) Intentionality: I want to produce something meaningful for people around me.

2) Deliberate practice: the effort to become better at something (e.g., writing, making videos, etc.) through precise and directed effort. No random swings.

3) Intuition: the network of dots generated based on our external and internal observations.

Mixing these three qualities together could create masterpiece essays, beautiful compositions, or 100,000,000 times played videos. It's just very hard to a) find them in today's madness and b) balance them correctly for a good result.

I'm still very, very far away from producing content that could stand above the average mediocrity, but it's a fun skill to learn if you want to play something long-term, even better if that content is made to address something with a deep meaning. The slop might be unavoidable on the path to good. Just be aware when you see it.