The Puffin, the Captain, and the Thirty-Six-Minute Win
How a boat ride in Maine reminded me what’s possible when you put the right tool in the right hands
A young woman captained the puffin cruise I went on yesterday out of New Harbor, Maine. Nevermind that she looked like she could’ve just wrapped up an Instagram influencer photoshoot. Her flawless skin, simple makeup, blond hair pinned with a banana clip, short shorts and tiny tee shirt had little if anything to do with her captaincy skills. She handled that boat with 100 tourists on it like Danica Patrick handled her race car at the Indy 500.
Thirty minutes out into the Atlantic Ocean in relatively calm seas took us to Egg Rock where seabirds including Eider Ducks, black guillemots, cormorants, and the iconic puffins co-exist. It wasn’t more than a minute upon arrival when the Audubon naturalist on board announced a pair of puffins were bobbing alongside us “at 10:00 o’clock” — alive because, in 1973, someone said, “Let’s bring them back.”
Nearly wiped out because of a chain reaction beginning in the Victorian era when feathered hats became en vogue, puffins have thankfully made a fierce comeback. Today, 3,000+ puffins live happily along the Maine coast, up from the alarming two that had naturalists wondering fifty years ago if they’d make it.
Small, deliberate choices shift outcomes. The increasing puffin colonies prove that. Alisha the boat captain who looks nothing like a grizzled old New Englander in yellow bib overalls, stinking of bait fish, beard stained yellow from decades of tobacco use, proves that.
Change doesn’t always come from the usual suspects. Sometimes it’s a young woman at the helm, or a decades-long project to bring back a bird nearly everyone had written off. My own restoration began the same way with an unexpected ally:
Turning AI into a daily practice. That's how I crawled out of algorithmic rock bottom.
The lever isn’t the tool; it’s how we use it, consistently, toward a result that matters.
It was January 2025, and instead of my usual new-year energy, I felt dread. I couldn’t face another year of the same digital grind: posting just to post, building programs nobody bought, chasing attention like a hamster in a wheel. I’d given 15 years to this Internet-based world, learned a ton, had some wins, but the return on investment—financial, emotional, creative—wasn’t adding up. I had a reckoning: I couldn’t see my way out.
The one throughline since 2014 has been my podcast. And in late January, during an interview with a CEO of an online learning platform, the conversation drifted to AI. He mentioned a book—The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods—and within days, I was reading it.
Not long after, the download for my book It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm hit me in one big storm. I couldn’t not capture what the Universe was giving me. Every artist knows that lightning-strike moment—you either honor it or it slips away.
Within weeks, I had a complete first draft of the book I didn’t even know I was going to write. At the start of the year, I’d told my good friend Tracy I wasn’t planning to write anything, just focus on my poetry. What’s that old saying? God laughs when you’re making other plans. The Universe does too.
Gen AI wasn’t new to me. Back in the twenty-teens, I’d played around with early tools like Jasper, cranking out bits of content for projects here and there, but it was never serious. I’d even used ChatGPT casually since it rolled out in November 2022. But this was different. This time, I wasn’t asking it to think for me. I was learning how to think with it.
One of my first tests was small but telling. I asked ChatGPT to draft a podcast episode description. Normally, that took me forty minutes, time I’d chip away at while wishing I could be working on something else. With AI, I had a solid draft in four minutes. That extra thirty-six opened up space for me to do other things, including pouring it straight into refining my book. That was my proof of concept: AI could give me time back without taking my voice away.
Try Your Own “Puffin Project”
If restoring puffins took a single clear decision and decades of steady work, your personal AI practice can start with one small choice today. Here are two experiments you can run this week:
The 36-Minute Win Test
Pick a recurring task you dread, e.g. writing a social post, summarizing a meeting, drafting an email.
Time yourself doing it the way you normally would.
Then, ask AI to create a first draft you can refine. (Refine is the power word here. Always make your writing ultimately your writing.)
Compare the time saved and the quality of the end product.
The Alisha Helm Swap
Think of one place in your work where you’ve been running on autopilot because “that’s how it’s always been done.”
Hand that process to AI and see what happens when a completely different “captain” takes the wheel.
You don’t have to keep the change, but you might see a route you didn’t know existed.
Small, deliberate choices shift outcomes. You don’t need to overhaul your entire workflow. Just give yourself one clear win you can measure.
Seeing puffins bobbing on the Atlantic in a boat captained by a young woman who didn’t fit the stereotype reinforced yet again something I’ve believed for a long time: change is possible, and it’s often better than what came before.
I don’t believe in going back. Time only moves one way. Looking back can offer clues, but the work is in deciding where to steer next.
Alisha has her wheel. I have my AI sessions. You have your version of both, something you can use on purpose to create better outcomes than the default. The only question is whether you’ll take the helm.