Perfect Storm

At three in the morning on Sunday 27 April 2025, Steve Bolton was awake in his apartment in Bournemouth. A message about his divorce remained unanswered. Earlier, his sister Michele had called with another problem: the live-in care team supporting their parents was leaving.

Both parents were seriously ill. The family had spent weeks settling the team in. Businesses still needed decisions, investors needed answers and the practical responsibilities of ending a long marriage continued alongside everything else.

During that year, Steve kept a spreadsheet of the things he was carrying because he could no longer hold them all in his head. It recorded 49 challenges. The list made the burden visible; it did not reduce it.

When working harder stopped being enough

In the book, Steve describes a period in which work and care filled almost every day. Four people close to him had died within three months. His sister, children and friends provided support, but the different demands on his attention did not arrive in an orderly sequence.

A business decision could follow a conversation about his parents. A legal email could arrive while he was trying to deal with something entirely different. The difficulty was finding enough clarity to consider each responsibility properly.

His early use of AI had been straightforward: write a draft, summarise something, find an answer. Those exchanges saved time. They did little to change the way he approached the underlying problems.

That night, he opened voice mode and began talking about the whole situation.

A conversation with room for the problem

Steve described the care arrangements, the divorce, the businesses and the decisions he was afraid of getting wrong. He explored what he could control and what he could not. The conversation gave him questions and something against which to test his thinking.

Some answers were wrong. He still found value in examining them and correcting what did not fit. The continuity allowed him to move between parts of a complicated situation without treating every question as an isolated request.

During the exchange, he asked AI for a metaphor describing what it would be like to be the system. The response imagined a dark room interrupted by people arriving with demands. Steve understood it as a generated metaphor, not evidence that the machine was conscious or lonely.

It prompted him to examine his own behaviour. He had been approaching AI almost entirely through instructions and outputs. He began supplying more context, asking better questions and inviting disagreement.

What carried forward

Steve called the AI Athena, a name that helped him organise his own approach. The name was optional. The more significant practice was returning to the work with useful context and a willingness to question what came back.

He began recording what helped: continuity, challenge, better questions and recognising when AI should be left out. Those observations became part of Bolt Method™.

The experience did not resolve the circumstances that had brought him to that conversation. His parents still needed care. The divorce and business responsibilities remained. In Steve’s account, the change was that he could more often examine the problem clearly enough to decide whether to act, wait or ask another person for help.

That is the purpose of telling the story. AI helped him think during a period when thinking had become difficult. Responsibility for the decisions, and the human relationships around them, remained with him.