A signature path
The Anchor Method
Most people in the AI age don’t sail. They drift.
The Anchor Method is how you sail on your own terms.
Thesis
Your trained instinct is the moat. AI is the leverage. What you’re rooted in is your anchor.
Most AI education teaches only the leverage. The Anchor Method teaches all three — and respects the person behind the work.
What’s changed
The cost of shipping has collapsed. What used to take a team of engineers and six months can now be done by one person, alone, in an afternoon.
That changes everything — including the difference between talking about the work and actually doing it.
And yet most people in the AI age don’t sail. They drift. Pulled into the next conference, the next hackathon, the next breathless framework. Activity, mistaken for direction. The cost is invisible at first — until you look down and realise you haven’t shipped anything in eighteen months.
The Anchor Method is the path from drift to ship. Three phases — Take Bearings, Charting Course, Open Waters — for the person who has real expertise, who’s allergic to hype, and who’s done mistaking the noise for the work.
The three parts, in depth
Read them slowly.
Each one is a working concept, not a slogan.
I
The moat — your trained instinct
Your trained instinct is the ship you’ve been building, plank by plank, for years. The thousand small patterns you’ve learned to recognise. The way you read weather, current, depth before anyone else can.
AI didn’t make you good at your work. Years did. And no amount of leverage rescues someone who never built the ship in the first place.
Lived experience + reflection + self-awareness = trained instinct. A flywheel: every new experience, refined by reflection, sharpens the instinct — which informs the next experience, which deepens the moat. Most people skip the reflection. The flywheel never starts.
II
The leverage — AI
AI is wind. It will speed up the people who already know how to set their sails — and capsize the ones who don’t.
The leverage isn’t the wind itself. It’s what happens when wind meets a vessel that knows what it’s for. AI on top of nothing is noise. AI on top of twenty years of trained instinct is leverage.
III
The anchor — what you’re rooted in
The third line is the most important and the most often missed.
What you’re rooted in is your anchor — your values, your reason for the work, the version of yourself you refuse to lose.
The wind doesn’t care where you go. AI will happily take you somewhere you never wanted to be: into the conferences, the hackathons, the LinkedIn posts that read like everyone else’s LinkedIn posts.
Without an anchor, you drift. With one, you choose your course — through the wind, through the tide, through every season the decade throws at you.
This is why the method is called The Anchor Method. The other two parts of the thesis fail without this one.
Three parts. Three phases. The Anchor Method walks you through all of them.
How to recognise your trained instinct
You probably already have it. Here’s what it looks like in your work.
The thing the AI conversation keeps calling “expertise” is too abstract to be useful. So — specifically, in the actual texture of your day — this is what we mean. If several of these feel like a description of how you already work, you have what The Anchor Method is built around.
- You ask questions in client meetings that no one else thinks to ask — and they land. People remember you for them.
- You can read a brief and intuit what the person actually needs — not just what they’re asking for.
- You have rules-of-thumb you’ve never written down — but you’d notice instantly if someone broke them.
- You spot the warning signs early. You sense when something is “off” before you can fully articulate why.
- Two senior people in your field, given the same brief, would land in different places. Your way is yours, and your clients pay for that way specifically.
- You have shortcuts that aren’t in any handbook — and the shortcuts mostly work.
- You’ve stopped doing things “everyone in the field does” because you noticed they backfire — even though no one else has named that yet.
That’s the moat. A flywheel: lived experience + reflection + self-awareness, compounding over years into trained instinct. The rest of this method is about externalising it — turning it into a system that can run when your hands aren’t on it.
The path
Take Bearings. Charting Course. Open Waters.
Three phases, in order. Each one earns the next. You can move at the pace your life allows — but every phase is non-optional. Skip Take Bearings and you’ll build something that ships someone else’s work. Skip Charting Course and you’re still talking. Skip Open Waters and you’ve mistaken the start of the voyage for the end of it.
I
Take Bearings
Know what you’re for
Find your true north.
Anchoring is the work that sounds least urgent and is most important: the slow, considered process of naming what you’re actually for, what’s worth your time, what you’d build even if no one were watching.
By the end of this phase, you have a direction you can navigate by — and recognise when you’re drifting from it.
II
Charting Course
Design the system
Turn your trained instinct into a working AI agent — no code required.
Map your trained instinct as a system: the questions you ask, the way you read briefs, the rules-of-thumb you’ve never written down, the shortcuts that aren’t in any handbook.
Then turn that internal map into a working AI agent — one that runs on the way you actually think, twenty-four hours a day. No terminal. No code. The only language you need is the one you already speak.
By the end, you’ve shipped something that runs in your name. Not a demo. A system.
III
Open Waters
Sail on your own terms
Become the kind of person who ships, in an age where talk is no longer enough.
When shipping is cheap, talk becomes worthless. The conferences, the panels, the LinkedIn essays — they used to be how you signalled relevance. Now they’re how you avoid the work.
By this phase, you’ve stopped being interested in the theatre. You ship. You learn from what you’ve shipped. You ship again. Your work speaks before your name does.
The destination isn’t a tool or a tactic. It’s sovereignty — the quiet kind that comes from sailing your own course.
Who this is for
Domain experts with real expertise.
- Mid-to-senior professionals who get paid for the way they think — for the questions they ask that no one else asks, for the patterns they spot before everyone else does, for the recommendations only they would have made.
- Founders, consultants, and operators who are done with the conference-and-hackathon merry-go-round and ready to ship instead.
- People who suspect that “just learn to code” was always the wrong frame — and who are ready to do something better with what they already know.
- People who would rather move slowly and properly than quickly and shallowly — and who can tell the difference between being busy and being on course.
Who this isn’t for
And that’s alright.
- Engineers who are already comfortable shipping — this isn’t the work you need.
- People who want a productivity hack rather than a path of considered work. The method is calm, but it isn’t small.
- People still convinced that being seen at the right events counts as building.
- Anyone hoping to “clone themselves” or “build an AI twin.” That isn’t the language we use here.
Begin
The next cohort sets sail when the season is right.
Cohorts are small and considered, by application. Add your name to the list and I’ll write when the next one opens.
Quick answers
Questions, answered
What is The Anchor Method?
The Anchor Method is a signature path that takes domain experts from drift to ship in the AI age. It moves through three phases — Take Bearings, Charting Course, Open Waters — and is built on three ideas: your trained instinct is the moat, AI is the leverage, and what you're rooted in is the anchor. It's designed for senior professionals who want to use AI on their own terms, not catch up to a moving tool.
Who is The Anchor Method for?
Domain experts and senior professionals who already have a real moat — the kind of trained instinct that took ten or twenty years to build — and who want AI to multiply that, not replace it. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, marketers, founders, civil servants, educators. The Anchor Method is not for people whose work is generic enough that any AI can replicate it; it's for people whose work has texture only they can read.
Do I need to learn to code?
No. The Anchor Method teaches you to build AI agents without writing code. The work is in mapping your trained instinct, designing the system that makes your judgement repeatable, and shipping working agents using current AI tools. Coding is not a prerequisite. Thinking precisely about what only you can do — that is the prerequisite.
How is The Anchor Method different from other AI training?
Most AI training teaches the leverage — tools, prompts, platforms — and stops there. The Anchor Method teaches all three: the moat (what you bring that AI cannot replicate), the leverage (how AI multiplies that), and the anchor (what you're rooted in that decides whether you ship or drift). It treats the person behind the work, not just the tool in front of it.
How long does the path take?
The cohort form runs across six weeks with around twelve people per cohort. The enterprise form is shaped to the company's pace. The Anchor Method itself is a way of working — once you've taken your bearings and charted course, you sail it for the rest of your career.
Where is Soh Wan Wei based?
Soh Wan Wei is an AI thought leader and keynote speaker based in Singapore. The Anchor Method work is delivered globally — cohorts run online, enterprise programs run in-region, and keynote engagements span Singapore, the rest of Asia, and beyond.