The habit: what you show, and what you keep so you can

This is a filing discipline before it is a presentation one. Almost everything here is about what you keep while you work, because none of it can be reconstructed afterwards.

1The unit: ask → work → outcome

One piece of proof is three things shown together.

1. The ask. The brief you were working to. What the client wanted, what they barred, what the constraints were. Not a summary — the actual instruction, which in this system is the filled-in brief from Module 2's template library.

2. The work. What came back, including the parts you didn't use. Three takes, not one.

3. The outcome. What shipped, what a person changed, and what the client actually saw.

Any one of those alone is weak. A finished video proves nothing about how it got made. A brief with no output is a document. The three together are checkable, and checkable is the whole point.

2The provenance line

Attach this to anything you show that had AI in its making. It is three lines and it goes underneath the artefact:

Generated 2026-08-11 · claude-opus · take 2 of 3
Prompt shown in full · human edit: cut line 1
Client saw: this version, unretouched

Read what each line is doing:

• Line 1 — what made it, when, and how many attempts. Take 2 of 3 is the most load-bearing phrase in the whole thing. It says a choice happened.
• Line 2 — the instruction is available, and a person intervened. Human edit: cut line 1 is not an admission. It's the evidence that you were reading.
• Line 3 — which version reached the client. Closes the gap between what you made and what shipped, which is where portfolios usually quietly cheat.

Write it as you go. Reconstructing "which take was this?" three weeks later is guesswork, and guesswork in a provenance line is exactly the thing it exists to prevent.

3Show the take that flopped

The counterintuitive move, and the highest-value one.

When you show three takes and say this is the one I chose, a prospect learns something they cannot learn any other way: what your standard is. The rejected takes define it more sharply than the chosen one does.

It also does something to the credibility of everything else you show. A portfolio of only successes reads as curated, because it is. A portfolio that includes the line you cut for being filler reads as a record.

This guide's own sales page does exactly this — it shows a generated hook set with one line struck through, and the note admits the guardrail should have caught the filler word and didn't. That admission costs nothing and buys the rest of the page its credibility.

4What to keep while you work

The habit, concretely. None of it takes more than a minute at the time.

The check report is worth singling out. A prospect asking "how do you make sure you don't say something my legal team will hate?" is answered far better by a real report with findings in it than by a description of your process. A report that found something and shows what you did about it is stronger than a clean one.

5The one stated exception

Sometimes you have to show something illustrative — a mock-up, a scene that didn't happen, a shape rather than a real piece. This is legitimate. Presenting it as real is not.

The pattern to copy is the one on this guide's own sales page. It carries an imagined week in the hero, and rather than hoping nobody notices the category difference, the memo names it directly under its own heading — one stated exception, so you don't have to work it out yourself — and then says exactly why it's a different kind of thing: it's labelled as imagined, typeset as a proposal rather than a record, and contains no figure presented as real.

Do the same. If something in your portfolio is spec, illustrative, or unbriefed, label it where the viewer meets it, not in a footnote. It costs you nothing — nobody has ever lost a job for labelling spec work — and the alternative is a prospect discovering the ambiguity themselves, at which point everything else you showed becomes a question.

6What not to do

• The polished fictional portfolio piece. A beautiful case study for a brand that never hired you, presented as if they did. This is the single most common failure in this industry and it ends relationships when it surfaces.
• Unlabelled spec work. Same thing, one degree softer, and it still counts.
• Borrowed work. Showing something you contributed one line to as though you made it.
• Before/after with no conditions. Module 2's demo template is strict about this for a reason: an unstated condition that favours the result is dishonest even when every frame is real.
• Retro-fitting the record. If a claim isn't supported, get the support or cut the claim. Do not edit your experience file afterwards to justify something you already wrote — that's the one edit that is always wrong, and Module 2's demo runs record it being declined rather than done.

7The pitch version

You do not send someone six files. You send:

One piece, one page. The brief at the top, the three takes underneath with the chosen one marked, the finished thing, and the provenance line. If there's a check report, link it.

That fits on a screen, takes ninety seconds to read, and tells a prospect more about whether to hire you than any number would.