The Workforce in my pocket.
The internet used to be my university. Now it’s that and so much more.
I had a kid at 19. Dropped out of college to start making money. Had a family to look out for. And also insatiable ambition. Being a teen dad intensified it. I was going to make something of myself. I had to learn as much as possible.
The internet became my university. I learned to write sales copy for Copyblogger.com. I learned how to code from Codecademy. Brad Feld’s blog taught me about startups. Seth Godin talks on YouTube taught me about small business and marketing.
I leaned in hard. I learned enough to make me an effective leader. Enough to give me confidence to start my own thing. I kept leaning on the internet to help me out, but it started to let me down.
Algorithms stole my attention. The internet stopped being the place I learned what I wanted to learn. It turned into a slot machine. Pull the lever and get some content. But the content wasn’t helpful. I stopped searching for knowledge. Started scrolling to see what the internet had in store for me. It became the place where I procrastinated.
I was sick of it. Tired of wasting time. Tired of feeling distracted. Tired of wanting to learn but ending up down a tunnel of junk food-style content.
Then ChatGPT came around.
I’ve been playing with it since OpenAI released GPT-3. I watched an app turn a sketch into a website. I was shocked. I forked out 20 bucks. I had to see what this new tool could do.
I started feeding it questions and giving it assignments.
What questions should I ask my customers to discover new product ideas?
Design a marathon plan and put the daily and weekly mileage on a table.
What would [some expert] advise me to do about [my problem]?
Pretend you are a support agent who works in a maintenance department. Help me troubleshoot an issue I am having.
The results were all over the place. Sometimes they were helpful. Other times they were nonsense. It would have been easy to write off the new tech as not ready. But one thing was consistent. It kept getting better. Better at a faster rate than any other tech I’ve ever used. Years better in months. It keeps happening. Faster and faster.
It became more reliable. More useful.
One day, I was struggling to close some new business. The prospect was haggling over price. I was trying defend our value. It was going nowhere. I asked ChatGPT for help. Gave it all of my call transcripts and emails. Asked it to be the best enterprise software sales person that ever existed. Told it to help me save the deal. It found something I failed to see. I closed the deal.
AI is simultaneously the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat to my business.
On the threat side, I fear one day people won’t need to buy software. They won’t need my software. Instead of buying software from a company. They’ll just fire up a chat in a AI app. Tell it what they want to do. AI will make them all the tools they need to hit their goals.
Maybe you want to start a company. You can tell an AI what you want to do. It will start building your resources and tools. One chat thread will turn into everything you need. It will plug into any third party service. It will spin up accounting software, an email server, get your website online. You’ll be able to do the work of 20 plus people. You’ll have a consultant in your pocket. This won’t happen for a decade, but it will happen.
While this scares me, it excites me. Because if this is the new reality, it will be the reality for me. I know what I can do with it.
I’m excited about what AI makes possible right now. There’s never been a better time to be an idea person. If you have vision, taste, and communication skills, you can get a lot done with a ChatGPT Pro account. It does what I used to hire people on Fiverr to do. It made the image for this post. It reviews contracts. Writes them too. Performs research projects. Answers questions. Edits my work. (I still have not been able to get any real software development done. Maybe because I don’t know enough to know good work from bad work. I can only judge working or not.)
I have a growing toolkit of AI apps for specific purposes. My favorite right now is called Spiral. I feed it a meeting transcript and it turns it into whatever I want. Writes it like I write based on examples I give it. It takes work I’ve already done—my words—and turns it into something else that’s useful. ChatGPT is still my workhorse.
The better these tools get, the better I get.
But maybe you are reading this and it scares you. It shouldn’t. Every new technology was exciting to the people that built with it and scary to the people who didn’t. People eventually caught up. Started using new technology themselves. Most people’s lives improved whether they contributed to progress or not.
AI is no different. You’ll either adopt it and benefit, or you’ll benefit from the people who adopt it. But either way, life will get better for people on general basis.
AI is only revolutionary in the hands of people who build, make, grow, and do. Most people won’t do anything with it. It will be the same as other tools and tech. The minority will use it to make things. Most will use it to entertain themselves. Consume. Do less. Waste more time.
Management skills and idea skills will take the place of knowledge skills.
You have to be able to set a vision, communicate clearly, and be an excellent judge of good work. So you need great ideas, clear thinking, and great taste.
Where do I land? I'm the teen dad who needed to learn fast and make something of himself. Now I have a workforce in my pocket. I am excited. Grateful to have tools that help me overcome what I cannot do alone. Tools that help me work faster. Move past obstacles. Keep me from procrastination. The internet university I once loved is finally back, but this time it's interactive, adaptive, and always ready to help.