Nobody Sends Back The Hot Wing

Order the hottest wing on the menu and the burn is a trophy. You sweat, you grin, you hold the bone up like it owes you money. Bite the same wing thinking it was the mild one and that identical fire becomes a betrayal, and somebody in the kitchen is about to hear about labeling.

Same pepper. Different ticket.

There’s a standing instruction in my Claude settings. Before it hands me anything final, it has to question me, and it has orders to say so directly when an idea is too safe, too vague, or too close to what everybody else would say. It takes the job seriously. More than once it has told me an idea I was proud of was somebody else’s idea wearing my jacket.

It’s hard to get mad at a burn you ordered. The instruction was never really for the machine. Claude doesn’t flinch. I do. Writing it down was a calmer version of me filling out the ticket, so the version of me at the table couldn’t send the plate back.

I do it at work now, too. Before most meetings where I’m bringing an idea, I open the call with it or Slack a teammate ahead of time: can you please challenge my thinking on this one?

They probably would have pushed anyway. Now we both walk in ready. The objection arrives as something I ordered, and the person raising it gets to be helpful instead of difficult. (My favorite is the teammate who was planning to nod along. Now they’ve been handed a job, and the job is finding the crack and calling it out. They usually end up shining more than the idea!)

Everybody you work with is already running instructions. Nobody wrote them down and everybody knows them by heart: be agreeable, don’t embarrass whoever brought the idea, save the real opinion for the DM after the call. One sentence overwrites all of it. It might be the cheapest investment you can make in a team, because it tells them their disagreement is the work.

We’ve gotten good at telling machines how to treat us. People will take the same instruction, and plenty of them have been waiting years for somebody to give it. No need to wait around for someone to decide your idea deserves a fight.

Never did, really.

Stay Positive & Order It Hot