Yesterday, Carolina and I sat down with Ryan Levesque to talk about his new book, Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything.
Ryan’s work has influenced several of the businesses I’ve built over the last decade.
His Ask Method was ahead of the curve then.
And I have a strong feeling Return to Real is ahead of the curve now.
Because while AI was part of our conversation, this wasn’t really a conversation about technology.
It was about what people are beginning to crave because of it:
Real-world experience.
Real connection.
Real trust.
And for anyone trying to turn meaningful work into a viable business, one distinction stood out.
Ryan talked about the tension between listening to the market and listening to what he calls “the contrarian voice of your heart.”
Listen only to the market and you can build something successful that slowly separates you from yourself.
Listen only to yourself and your work may remain meaningful, but private, untested, and disconnected from the people it could serve.
The opportunity is where those two voices meet:
What is true for you.
And what genuinely matters to someone else.
That intersection is where meaningful work becomes a business.
Ryan’s new book is a great example.
He didn’t disappear for two years, emerge with a perfectly completed idea, and hope the market understood it.
He wrote about ideas while they were still forming.
He shared what he called his “half-baked ideas.”
He watched what created a response.
And he allowed those real responses to sharpen the thinking, the language, and eventually the book itself.
That is an important lesson for anyone carrying work they want to bring into the world:
You do not discover the final form of your work before sharing it.
You discover it by sharing it.
You make an invitation.
You have the conversation.
You notice what resonates.
You listen for what people actually need.
Then you refine the work and make another invitation.
This is why we believe clarity comes through movement.
You can think deeply about your work. You can plan, prepare, and refine it.
But eventually, it has to meet another person.
Your first invitation may not contain the perfect words.
Your first offer may evolve once it meets a real client.
Your first conversation may reveal something you could never have discovered through another month of thinking alone.
That doesn’t mean abandoning what is true for you to chase whatever the market appears to want.
It means allowing your deeper work to enter into a living relationship with the people it is meant to serve.
That relationship is where clarity comes from.
And your first yes is more than a sale.
It is the moment something true in you meets something genuinely needed by another person.
That is exactly the work we are doing inside Your First Yes.
We help you take the work that has been calling you and turn it into one clear offer, real invitations, meaningful conversations, and the feedback you need to keep making it stronger.
Not through more private preparation.
Through supported movement in the real world.
If you feel ready to stop working on your business entirely from the inside and begin discovering what it can become in relationship with real people, comment FIRST YES, or shoot me an email to learn more
Phil
P.S. I highly recommend watching our complete conversation with Ryan. We explored trust, human-created work, the role of AI, finding the intersection between your heart and the market, and why there may be more opportunity ahead for genuinely skilled practitioners than many people realize.
Ryan’s book, Return to Real, launches September 29. You can explore the book and current preorder opportunities here:
You can also follow Ryan’s ongoing writing at The Digital Contrarian →.
Thank you Monique Renée, Andrew David Shiller, MD, Anne Rottie, Ruth Urman, and many others for tuning into this special author spotlight with Ryan Levesque.
