I’ve described a lot of what I do at 630 Volleyball as “because I can.” It’s a useful shorthand, but it leaves out the choice. I want to put my time and ability into the club, and I make a judgment about where they can be useful. It’s a calculated decision about where desire and ability meet.
Generative AI changes that calculation by expanding what I can bring to it. I can contribute across more kinds of work within the time I have. I still choose where that time goes.
Hunter S. Thompson addressed a version of this in his 1958 letter to Hume Logan. He argued for choosing a way of life in which a person’s abilities serve their desires. His phrase was to “make the goal conform to the individual.” The starting point is the person deciding what kind of life to pursue. A role or a goal has to fit into that decision. Read the letter.
At 630, that choice takes a practical form. My work moves between leadership support, websites, registration, communications and tools for staff. Those categories describe different skills, but the work often belongs to the same problem.
In October, the website and two LeagueApps registration descriptions disagreed about when the Girls season would begin. Staff supplied the correct date, November 30. Updating the newsletter draft would have left families able to follow its links to pages that still said something else.
I directed an AI agent to carry the correction through the website and both LeagueApps records. The work included comparing the published descriptions, changing the season-start wording, and checking the saved result on the public pages. The tryout dates and registration settings stayed as they were. The newsletter remained a draft while its other content awaited completion and review.
That distinction mattered. The dates described separate things, and the agent needed a clear instruction about which one to change. The staff supplied the program fact; I decided what work to carry through. The agent performed the updates and checks. At the end, the public pages agreed on the season start.
That is the kind of contribution I mean. A decision had to make it through several systems before the information families could see matched what the club had confirmed. The finished correction is a concrete result. It doesn’t establish that registrations increased or that fewer parents needed help.
With AI, I can “cook more” in two senses. More help with preparation lets me feed more people. Access to recipes, techniques and guidance lets me learn to cook a wider variety of cuisines.
In my work, AI helps with research, writing, design and building tools. That makes it practical to contribute to more parts of a problem, including parts where I need to learn something. An unfamiliar cuisine still calls for tasting, practice and advice from someone who knows it better.
Being able to make more things still leaves me to choose what I want to make. At 630, I’m putting that capacity into work I want to do, with a practical judgment about what the club needs and what I can contribute.
That is also how I understand the Chief of Staff role we’ve been discussing. It would formalize work that connects leadership decisions to what happens next: help think through the options, bring the right people into the decision, and carry agreed priorities through to completion.
The people leading Operations and Training would keep their authority. Their knowledge determines whether a process fits the club and whether a claim about a program is accurate. My contribution would be to help connect that knowledge to the systems, communications and follow-through the decision requires.
A staff member can use the corrected information without knowing how the website was edited. A family can read the season details without needing to reconcile competing dates. That is how the contribution can reach beyond the work I personally do.
For the Chief of Staff proposal, the next step is to make that choice concrete with the club: agree on the priorities, the time available and who owns each decision. Then follow the selected work through to something staff and families can use.
