Chaos to Clarity

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Most people are using NotebookLM like a research tool.

Not leveraging it to its full potential.

They wait until everything is neat, upload clean PDFs and polished decks, and then get exactly what you would expect: tidy summaries of tidy thinking. Safe. Predictable. Forgettable. Meanwhile, the sharpest insights in their business are rotting in voice notes, half-written emails, and screenshots no one ever opens again.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you?

We are going to literally flip the script this week. We are going to feed it raw, unfiltered notes, rambling screenshots, half-formed thoughts, meeting notes, and ideas that have not even been thought through.

We are going to watch NotebookLM actually be able to perform amazing patterns in unstructured magic. From scattered thinking and chaos, a research assistant can help you spot connections that you are looking to form.

Let’s dance.

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Learn more.

Move Away From Polished

The default workflow looks like this:

• Do your research.

• Organize it into documents.

• Upload those documents into NotebookLM.

• Ask for summaries, comparisons, and key points.

That is great for:

• Legal docs and contracts.

• Formal research and reports.

• Policy, regulatory, and compliance work.

When the input is already structured, you want NotebookLM to behave like a disciplined synthesizer. It will.

But for the work that actually sets you apart, strategy, positioning, offer design, and account planning, this approach is often too tame. The outputs track almost exactly with the structure you imposed.

You get:

• Clean overviews.

• Clear summaries.

• Nothing that truly surprises you.

It’s like you just drove a Ferrari down a busy street…still haven’t really been able to truly drive this car and see what it’s really made of.

If you want to check out some of my other articles. Check them out here:

The Free Infographic Hack Your Team Is Missing 

You Can’t Hit Big Targets With Small Support 

5 Bad Habits of Lazy Prompts 

Feed It Chaos

The real unlock is using NotebookLM backwards.

Instead of:
“Once this is organized, I will upload it.”

You decide:
“The fact that this is a mess is exactly why I am uploading it.”

Take a real week in your work life. You probably have:

• Notes from multiple client or stakeholder calls.

• Screenshots from Slack or Teams with key comments.

• Draft emails you never sent.

• A few pages from your notebook or photos of a whiteboard.

• One or two voice memos where you talked through a problem.

Normally, this is clutter. You promise yourself you will “go through it later.” You rarely do.

With a backwards NotebookLM workflow, that clutter becomes your starting dataset.

Here is an Example

I used an old strategy review from one of my notes from 2 years ago to walk through this. I dropped the rambling notes into NotebookLM. These were high-level notes that I jotted down based on a prior conversation that I had where I was just organizing my thoughts.

I just copied the notes into NotebookLM.

Adding in Voice Notes

This is an absolute gold mine to help with short thoughts and ideas.

All the institutional knowledge that you get from your subject matter experts. This is a great way to structure it into future content across your company.

Why

Most busy individuals think out loud more than they think on paper.

You pace on calls.
You debrief with yourself in the car.
You rant into your phone after a meeting that went sideways.

Those rambling audio notes feel disposable. But they contain things that rarely show up in nicely typed notes:

• The moment you talk yourself into or out of an idea.

• The doubt you hesitate to admit in writing.

• The third option you consider for half a second and drop.

• The point you repeat three times without noticing.

When you transcribe and upload those raw voice memos, NotebookLM can:

• Pull out the core thesis you were circling but never nailed.

• Highlight where you contradict yourself, which is often where the real decision tension lives.

• Separate the emotional venting from the actionable insight.

You have a voice recorder right in the palm of your hand. Notebook LM can help you take your ideas and make them into something concrete.

You will often see your own thinking more clearly than you did in the moment.

Your voice and the way you capture the insights on what you are thinking is much different from when you have to write it down. The amount of energy it takes to sometimes process it from mind to paper can be exhausting.

Just take the time to record and let NotebookLM do it for you.

Let them clean up the mess for you and provide the clarity.

Live in the Chaos

You do not need to overhaul your system. Run one small experiment.

Pick a live initiative that feels fuzzy. Then:

1. Collect the chaos.

   • Grab notes, screenshots, draft docs, and at least one voice memo related to that initiative.

   • Drop them into a fresh NotebookLM notebook, no cleaning.

2. Ask for patterns, not summaries.

   • “What themes, opportunities, or risks show up repeatedly across these sources?”

3. Ask NotebookLM what you are missing.

   • “Based on this material, what important questions have I not asked yet?”

4. Turn one insight into an action.

   • Use what you see to:

     • Rewrite one outreach email.

     • Adjust one slide in a pitch.

     • Refocus one internal conversation.

Use a simple success test:

But if you do get that one insight, do not stop. Build this into how you work.

Because the difference between operators who “use AI” and operators who really leverage it will not come down to who has the fanciest model. It will come down to who is willing to feed it the real, messy, unfiltered raw material of their work and let it show them what they have been missing.

Your chaos is not the problem. It is the asset. You just need a better way to mine it.

What the Internet Taught Me This Week

From new tools, recent trends, and market updates, here is what has been on my mind.

1. Anthropic put out a Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence. Check it out here

2. Senate clears staff to use ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. Check it out here

3. Lawmakers question DoD’s growing use of equity investments to strengthen DIB. Check it out here

You are probably using one of the smartest AI tools on the market, like it is a PDF summarizer with a fancy logo.

You give it clean reports, neat decks, polished research, then act mildly impressed when it hands you back a clean recap of the thing you already read. That is not insight. That is admin.

The real advantage starts when you stop babying the tool and start feeding it the truth of how you actually work. The chaos. The half-baked. The stuff you would never show a client.

Two weeks of messy client notes.
Screenshots from Slack fights about scope.
Voice memos you recorded in the car after a brutal call.
Whiteboard photos from a “great session” that never went anywhere.

Everyone else lets that rot in their apps.

You are going to turn it into an engine.

Flip the workflow you have ever felt like you are drowning in inputs, but starving for clarity.

This one will change how you work. Let me know how it goes.

See you next week.

Whenever You’re Ready, Here are 4 Ways I Can Help You:

1. Unlocking Hidden Potential – Reconnecting with Past Clients for Explosive Growth – Check out my free eBook on how you can find hidden gems in your past clients and help you crush your sales goals.

2. AI for Business Development – Download our free eBook on how you can effectively leverage AI prompts to your advantage. From properly setting up your preferred AI tool, to how to shape your prompts, save time, and get the outputs you are looking for.

3. Sales Resources at Your Fingertips – From tools, tips, demos, and how-tos, check out our Pages and content that can provide you with additional support, whether it be social selling, account management, or something else.

4. Cribworks Advisor Program – Want more than just resources? Reach out to me and see if our Advisor Program can help you scale your business.