41 Minutes Of Honest Advice For Beginner Creators

I've always wanted to do this style of video. So we're going to do a Q&A and it's based on questions that you guys asked inside of the new sub stack. And based on the questions like what is the most future proof skill to learn right now? Or should you build an audience first or sell a digital product first? What platform do you start on? How do you talk about the ideas you want to talk about while making them interesting enough for other people to follow? With all of those taken into account, I feel like this is going to be like a condensed masterclass on the beginner questions that people have when starting as a creator or a personal brand or one person business, whatever it may be. So I'm excited to do this. And I want to preface that if I start ranting or yelling, I'm not yelling at the person that asked the question, I'm not yelling at you, that's just me showing my excitement and trying to get the point across. So the first question is from Natalia. And in essence, it says, what is the most future proof skill to learn in the age of AI and why for running your own business? And I'm going to tie it in with a question from Alex, which pretty much says, how do you acquire new skills or try new systems while also sticking to the fundamentals? So let me frame the answer to both of these questions like this. The reality is that to do your own thing, there is a limited number of skills that you need to learn. Me, personally, I am mostly now learning about my interests. I'm learning things that I want to learn about. I'm learning new skills, sure, but they aren't really anything that I incorporate in how I'm running my creator business or personal brand every single day. So that's very good news is that you're not just endlessly learning skills. There are very few skills, the lever moving skills, which I previously called the million dollar skill stack in a video like two years ago. Those are really the skills that you need to learn and practice every single day. And those skills are writing, speaking, marketing and sales. Now, why writing or speaking? It's because every business is a media business now. And I mean, you're watching this because you're a creator or personal brand or some kind of online business that has to write social media content. You're writing media, you're creating media. Now, the reason I put writing as more of a future proof skill than video or image design, like on Instagram is because one, writing is accessible. Anyone can do it to your video quality or design quality. If you're on Instagram or something about like that, you're putting ideas out onto social media, right? Ideas, advice, personal experiences, whatever they may be. And if you don't know how to articulate those thoughts in an engaging way, then the video isn't going to do well. The design, the image isn't going to do well. When you learn to write first, you become much better at articulating the thoughts that you're trying to get across. So I'm not saying don't learn video, don't learn design. I'm saying learn to articulate your ideas by writing first. And the way that I personally do this or recommend doing it on social media is to start with a writing-based platform like X, LinkedIn, Threads, Substack, I guess, now, because once you really master writing short form content and you get those ideas and you make them very good, they're so much easier to transfer over into a real script, a short script, a TikTok script, whatever it may be. And when you write something like a newsletter for audience capture, which is just necessary, even if you are mainly a YouTuber or a short video creator, it's just necessary to be able to have a more dedicated audience that you can transfer anywhere. It isn't bound by the platform. It can't be taken away from you. You can reach them directly via email. It's just a smart move. But once you have these backlog of newsletters that you've sent, those can easily turn into a YouTube script or a podcast script. And since those ideas are well articulated, you're going to do a lot better than someone who just goes straight into the camera and tries to articulate their thoughts. That's why most people who try starting a YouTube channel don't do so well is because they just feel overwhelmed and lost every time they turn on the camera. So that's like the first group of skills, right, is just media. You need to be able to generate traffic, build some kind of an audience, mainly generate traffic, because you need, if you want to build in any kind of income, doing anything, you need a product and you need people. If you just build the product, like people building a software startup and they're just mastering, okay, here's the product, the software that I'm building, or creators who just go in and build the digital product, but then they make no sales, it's because you don't know how to bridge the gap between here's 5 billion people on social media. Here's how we get in front of them with something like writing or media. Now, how do I get them to a product that they want and is beneficial to their lives? So that's the future proof skill stack, you have the traffic with something like writing and then marketing and sales is understanding human psychology. So you know what product is one worth building, what's impactful and how to package up whatever you put in that product to make it desirable to the person who it's made for. Now, in the age of AI, what do I recommend as the most future proof skill? And I would make this two parts. So the most future proof skill that I think is going to be around is systems thinking, that's kind of like a soft skill. But what I mean by that is being some kind of a prompt engineer, right, you have the general understanding of AI tools, but you understand that it's not AI that isn't as good as you, it's that you aren't good enough to make AI as good as you or better, because most people just when they use AI, they treat it like a Google search, which is fine, it's very powerful to do it that way. But you don't understand that you can create a prompt with extremely detailed context and instructions, and you can have it spit out something like a landing page or an email that's more persuasive or as persuasive as legendary copywriters like David Ogilvy, if you understand how to transfer David Ogilvy's methods into the AI as a system, feed it your context, what product you're trying to sell, what your offer is, the pain points of your customer avatar, so on and so forth, and then it writes it in a much better way than you ever could. That's a future proof skill. Now, many people think that like CEOs, we're going to talk about this in a future video, but many people think that CEOs saying, oh, you need to become a prompt engineer or you need to learn AI, and they're just like automating themselves out of a job. That doesn't happen when you're a creator or a personal brand or doing your own thing, because the CEO of the company is automating out the workers with AI. What you're doing instead is you're creating workers for your one person business with AI. Now, the caveat here is that in many cases, AI isn't there yet, but it absolutely will be. So if you learn and start using AI now, that's the best way to learn it is to try to automate yourself out of work in a sense. So you have a task that you want to do, you break it down into the exact instructions as if you are teaching an employee how to do it, you need to become a manager, and then you create the prompt out of it, you test it to see how good it is, and then you refine it until it's good enough, and then you slowly create this prompt library to cover different aspects of your business like marketing, creating a landing page, market research, so on and so forth, product launches, and you have this little army of employees that are called prompts for AI, and that's invaluable. But my last piece of advice here, because this is a two-part thing, the most future-proof skill is AI in a sense, but you need to pair that with one thing that you deem the most meaningful work to do, the thing that you don't want to give up, the thing that is your craft. For me, that's writing. I won't let AI touch my writing because when the AI spits out the writing, it's not me. I don't feel authentic posting that thing. So master one thing that is the main thing that you do, the main thing that you're known for, but also become a generalist in being able to cover different aspects of your business with AI. So you get to focus on your craft and the thing that you love while being able to actually build a rather large business because you have AI on your side. That's the most future-proof double skill stack. So the next question is from Zayn and it pretty much says, "How do you balance being original or authentic while also doing what works?" This is extremely important and relevant to most creators because most creators start creating because they want to do what they want. They want to talk about the ideas that they love talking about. They want to create a product that they think is very cool. They want to write this poetry or create this music or create this art, whatever it may be. But if the other person doesn't care about it, if people don't care about what you do, then you're not going to go anywhere, right? Creation in general is a two-player game. You have the creator and the consumer and if the consumer doesn't like what the creator puts out, then the creator isn't going to be able to sustain what they're doing because they don't have someone, they don't have supporters. So I want you to think of all of the ideas in your head or the things that you want to talk about as items in this little cardboard box and everything's jumbled up inside of the box and the box is just a plain brown cardboard box and nobody wants it because it's ugly. It's a jumbled mess. People don't know how to make sense of it. So you need to master the art of packaging, right? If you've ever studied anything related to YouTube, you understand that the title and thumbnail are where 80% of the work is done because if people don't click on your thumbnail or title, they're not going to see what's inside the video. If people don't see your box, design like a beautiful Apple box, right? The unboxing process is amazing. People want to open it. They want to click on your video. They want to read your post. If they don't open the box, then they're not going to see what's inside and if what's inside is all jumbled and like you click on a video and you just don't know what they're saying or why it's relevant to the title and you click away, you need to master both of those. The packaging, what makes people click or read or what captures attention and what's inside and usually what's inside is storytelling, right? So if you want the 80/20 of this and how to structure something, you usually start with a pain point. So you have the topic, right? You have the topic or idea you want to talk about what's a relevant pain point to the person you can help the most life. And then from there, it's pretty easy. I like to start almost everything. If I don't know what to write about, either in short form content or to create a video about, I usually just start with a pain point or problem that's pretty relevant and that people will resonate with. And to add more fuel to this, write it or create it as a personal experience. So when did you face this problem or pain point? What did it feel like? What made you realize the pain point? And then after that, it's just as simple as key points, right? Key point one, key point two, key point three with information inside of there that helps lead people toward the solution. Now for the packaging around that story to get people to be interested in actually starting the story, you don't want to go the clickbait route. You want to go the legit bait route. And the best way I don't want to take up this entire video, giving you like my own framework or process for doing this, literally the best way to do this is to just study them, study them and try to replicate them. What I mean by this, if you're creating YouTube video or any content because YouTube's great, and it's a gold mine for titles and thumbnails, which are hooks that capture attention, you choose five accounts, you go to those accounts that are within your niche, talk about similar topics as you, it's kind of the niche that you want to join, you go to their accounts, you go to their videos, and you go to the popular tab where it shows their most popular videos, and you just soak your mind in those and you write them down, write down the titles and then break down why they work or ask AI, give them 10 titles to break down and say, why do these work? Why do they capture attention? Why are they clickable? That will teach you. And then from there, you can say, okay, I have this idea I want to write about, can you help me make this more clickable according to what we just talked about? And usually you'll get a few title ideas that are pretty good, and you'll slowly learn as you do this. Now with short form content is just smart to keep a swipe file, right? When you see a piece of short form content, like a real or a tweet or a substack note that is doing well, save it, ask AI to break it down and tell you why it does well, and then try to replicate that. Now in terms of learning how to package things, I actually wrote a post on this in my new substack, which we'll talk about the decision behind that later. But I wrote a post on that if you want to check it out, links in the description. And the last thing I can offer you to study here is to just study the basics of direct response marketing or ask AI to kind of build you a custom course on it or just walk you through the basics of it, read the book Influence by Robert Cialdini and study offer creation. So one thing I would do here is ask AI, like break down the principles of Alex Hormozzi's offer creation framework, and then you can start asking questions about why in the chat itself. Okay, a little fun question here. Mike is asking if everything I built were about to disappear, and I had 60 seconds to leave my legacy, what would I say? Now I actually saw where this is from, I saw the reel on Alex Hormozzi's channel, he was on a podcast, the guy asked him this question, and he said something like do as much volume as humanly possible, figure out what you want and something else, which is great advice. And when I first thought about this question, one of the first things that come to mind was that I'd say nothing, I just kind of float out into a relevance because I'm not anyone's lord or savior, and I don't like to think of myself like that. I hope that my work has had an impact. But at the same time, it's always been up to the individual. It's always been up to you. Nothing that I say in my last 60 seconds on the internet is going to really change anything. It may cause you to feel good for a second and give you a bit of motivation. But that 60 seconds worth of advice isn't going to change anything in your mind, because changing your mind is a more ongoing process. But if I were to not take that cop out answer, and I were to say something, I would say kind of the opposite of Alex Hormozzi, where I'd say become brutally aware of what you don't want in life, work in the opposite direction and error correct along the way, make mistakes, correct the mistake, make the mistake, correct the mistake, make the mistake, correct the mistake and slowly you gather vision, you collect vision, it's not all at once. And that's how you figure out what you want. Then you can start heading in a more clear direction. You never really figure out what you want because that's always changing and the world changes. So I would say continuously become brutally aware of what you don't want out of life, and just move slowly away from that. All right, now a question from Yan, which says when starting from scratch as a beginner today, would you consider a substack over X for building a one person business style audience? So the question behind this is because this Q&A was in the private substack. And I recently transferred a portion of my email list over to substack, not the full thing. I just wanted to start posting on substack. I decided I was going to start writing my newsletters on substack twice a week. And then on my main email list, I was just going to do a summary of everything that happened that week. So it's more like actionable. People who don't have a lot of time in the day can just pay attention to that newsletter. And so with me starting on there, people started asking like, Hey, what was this move about? Why are you on substack now? Do you see it as beneficial? Is there anything here? And personally, I do think substack is a bit underrated right now. I do think it will grow a good amount. I think it's a good place to start. But since it doesn't have as much monthly active users as something like X or threads or any other social media, you may or may not get the results that you're looking for. But with all of this, it really depends on your vibe. Yes, you can make substack work. Of course, you can make X work. Yes, you can make threads work. You can definitely make LinkedIn work, but it really depends on your vibe. For substack, it feels like more deep thinkers, it's more people, people want that authenticity. There isn't too much clickbait there, which is great, even though the writing is still attention grabbing. It's much more for the people who crave those deep thoughts and desires, even though the growth may not be as fast as other platforms. LinkedIn, I personally think is probably the fastest way you could grow. But that's where all the corporate mumbo jumbo is. And it's very dress shirt and tie type feel, which is okay. But everyone's pockets on LinkedIn are loaded. If you want to make a lot of money selling something like a digital product, then I'd probably go the LinkedIn route first and stop worrying about the status that comes from growing on something like X or substack or threads. Now, what I really do like about substack is that one, your followers are actually newsletter subscribers. It's a newsletter centric platform, right? So it's people are used to reading long form content, which is good because there isn't much a short attention spans on substack. The second thing is that people are used to paywalls there. So while they may not be more likely to just continue stacking up subscriptions to paid newsletters, they're used to people selling things there. So it's not like people are going to clown you for trying to sell a digital product or something like that. They're usually going to be pretty supportive. Now, what I recommend going with the paid newsletter subscription model on substack, maybe, maybe not. I did because I have a large audience and I have that luxury for you. I don't know, you can try it, just see how it works and then close it down. If you don't want to do that, I'd recommend some other kind of digital product, which I believe there's another question on that we will get to. But the problem with the subscription model as a beginner, so like even like a school community or any kind of community or a membership subscription to a substack or paid newsletter or anything like that is they're usually very low ticket. So a $5 subscription, a $10 subscription, a $20 subscription, you need a lot of fricking sales in order to make the income you want to make. So you either need to be extremely good at generating traffic or you have to have a large audience or you have to be willing to stick it out long enough a year or two years to build up this recurring income that can then replace what you're trying to do. The other thing is that it's recurring work. So if you're doing something like a subscription, you have to kind of double your output in a sense beyond content. You need to write paid content and you have to do that indefinitely for the life of the community or you need to know how to structure communities. The other thing is that people are more averse to adding another subscription to their actual to their bank account, right? They don't want to pay for unlimited subscriptions to all of these different things. They'd rather pay one time for $150 product than one time for, I mean, then multiple times for something like a $5 product. So I'll let that lead into these two questions. So another one from Zane is should you build a product when you have zero followers or grow first? And I'm going to pair that along with one from Joe, which says, "What are the best vehicles as digital products to succeed?" Right off the bat, I would absolutely recommend building a digital product right when you start. Absolutely right when you start if you have expertise in that thing or you have something that you want to sell. You know what you're going to sell and you're not just trying to pull it out of your butt to be able to monetize. You need to be actually good at what you do and have something that's somewhat novel, right? Somewhat unique, something a little bit different than what you see online most of the time. Because the thing is, products create authority. A lot of the reasons that people don't grow is because they don't have a product. They don't have anything more to help their followers with. They're not building a dedicated group of people that actually care about what they want to do. On social media or in newsletters, you're not really going to change someone's life. When people invest in something into a product, they're not only investing their money, they're investing their attention. When people pay, they pay attention. They go through your product. They implement something that is arguably more actionable because it's a product. You're helping them reach a desired outcome. The more people that go through your product and reach that desired outcome and get results with it, the more they view you in a higher light and the more loyal and dedicated fans that you have. The other thing here is that when you have a product, it becomes a lot easier to come up with content ideas because you can base a lot of your content on ideas from the product itself. So a lot of people don't resonate with just talking about whatever you want because they don't have a guiding light. They don't have a product. When it comes time to write content for the week, they don't promote every day. They don't promote their product. They don't have anything to sell. There's no motivation behind staying as a creator because there's no way for them to make an income or they just think they have to go on Medium or YouTube to get paid out this measly like 50 bucks, 100 bucks a week that they can't live on. I don't think you should bank on ad money or platform revenue alone. It can be a nice little bonus, but it's not anywhere near the revenue or money you can make from just building your own product. The other thing with digital products is that they're so fluid. When you're a beginner, it doesn't really matter if the product is bad. Of course, you want to get results for other people. You want the product to be good, but it being your first product, it's probably not going to be that good and that's okay and you have to put it out anyways and you have to try to make sales because the only way to refine the product is through customer feedback. And then once you get the customer feedback, you can change it. But with a digital product, you can change it at any time. You can go in and add a module. You can go in and change a few things. You can go in and add videos. You can update it. You can relaunch it when you're at 10,000 followers instead of zero followers. You can do so many different things very quickly with a digital product. With something like a software, which I'm building right now, I'm assuming that you don't have or don't want to spend $50,000 to develop one feature in an answer to some customer feedback and that takes two to three months to do. With a digital product, you do that extremely fast. With a software, it's very slow and it costs a lot of money. Yes, even with all of our employees or contractors or co-founders using AI. So rather than months of time and $50,000 to add a feature to a software, you just spend a few deep work sessions adding it to the digital product and then you have a better product. So it's not something that you launch at zero followers and then just let die out. It's something that you continuously refine and iterate over time and you relaunch as it gets better. So now what kind of what kind of digital product do you launch as a beginner? We already talked about communities or sub-stack subscriptions. So like school or circle or sub-stack, the pros are that it's recurring and it builds over time and it's flexible. But the cons are as I state is that people are more averse to subscriptions. Churn sucks when people sign up and leave. So you only make like five bucks, but people can join, read what they want to read and then cancel. And you need to be good at traffic and marketing, right? Because you need to be able to keep it alive over time and you need to be able to promote it all the time. Now the next thing is self-paced courses. So a typical course that you see and these are actually going through this new revolution that hopefully I can be a part of with Cortex and help fuel it. But courses right now are static, right? That's kind of like I take my unique system and I put it in this curriculum that you can go through and you can learn. But I think courses are going to see some kind of a shift where rather than just a static curriculum with writing and videos, it's going to be along with AI, right? People are going to include prompts or they're going to include something like a Cortex workspace when our custom prompts feature is ready where they can invite people to that workspace and then they can use the prompts along with the study material to tailor it to them specifically. So I don't see courses going away. I see them evolving into something new that allows them to be more tailored to the individual and rather than only learning something like if I give you my content writing system in the form of a course, you still have to do all of that yourself. But with AI, it would be able to be trained on my course. You would be able to learn it and you would have AI be able to write as me for you. So we're going to enter this market, not where you can ask AI to create some kind of content that's just really good. You're going to find people who have this very good way of writing content because there's so many different ways to write it. If you just ask AI, it's not going to give you the best one because there's only one output that AI can give you. We're going to have to choose like, okay, I own this business. I want to market this way. I need to find someone who teaches that and provides the AI system in order to do that. And I'm going to purchase that off of them so I can use it in my own business. So that's where I see self-paced courses going. So that's a major pro. The con is that you continuously have to promote them time and time again. And there's kind of like a curve. When you're building an audience, there's a curve that goes off with it where after launch, you get a good amount of sales and then it slowly starts to go down. And you either have to update the course or you have to relaunch it or you have to create another course on top of that. And you have to continue doing that over time. It's not bad. It can make you a good amount of money. But as a beginner, who's probably not that good at generating traffic and hasn't practiced marketing enough to understand what makes sales, self-paced course is an okay option. It's definitely possible. I mean, I started with self-paced courses and an e-book of all things. An e-book is a great option. But those are more like side income, right? That's probably not going to replace your entire salary as a beginner. It's probably going to make you a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. And that's nothing to scoff at. And as your audience grows, of course, that number grows with it. So very good option. But I personally think that cohorts or some kind of challenge or workshop is a better option. What I mean by a cohort challenge workshop, whatever it may be, is that you have a curriculum, you have the education portion, but it's structured in a way that only happens every few times every year. And that's when you allow people in. And a lot of the time with something like a cohort, you have a group call either every week or two times a week or something like that. So that adds more value to it because there can, those can be Q&As or bonus sessions or other things of that nature. So it's a more deeper learning experience. And sometimes they're paired with a community as well. So people can talk outside of the call. So it's just a big value add. So you can charge a lot more rather than charging 150. You're charging closer to 300, 499, something like that. So you don't need as many sales in order to make a decent amount of money. The other thing is that with something like a cohort, it's actually worth doing some manual outreach. So if you understand a client based business or service business, you're usually doing cold emails or cold direct messages to either people in your audience or people that you just think will be a good fit. And you run them through a sales process in order to close that thing, you get on a sales call with them, you talk about how it can help their business so on and so forth, study sales, if you want to learn that, and customer acquisition methods. But that's how you land a high ticket client for something like $2,000 or over. But with a cohort where it's like 300, 400, $500, you need like 10 people to make $3,000 to $5,000, maybe 20 people, I think that's more than manageable. So when you're going through the launch process of a cohort, you can reach out to people directly because that has a higher ROI, if you can get them to buy. So it's like a hybrid between high ticket and low ticket. And it's something very valuable. Now to add more fuel to the fire is if you understand marketing, you understand that scarcity or urgency is something that drives a lot of people over the edge to buy, right? When you look at Young LA or a lot of the new e-commerce brands, they're not really stocking their store with their best selling products. They know what works, and then they run a limited time drop. So hey, it's going to drop on this day. Once they're sold out, they're sold out and they send text messages, they send emails to everyone in their audience, and then they sell out and they make millions of dollars doing that. So with a cohort where there's a closed enrollment date like, hey, we start on this day and end on this day, the last day you can enroll is on the start date. So that's when you're sending out the most emails. That's when you're following up with people and being like, hey, dude, we're closing tomorrow. Do you want to join? That's when you're going to make the most sales. And it's a lot more compelling than something like a self-paced course. And you don't have to use fake scarcity in order to do that. You don't need to use a fake countdown timer. You don't need to use, oh, there's only 10 digital products left. It's real. You start on this day. Enrollment closes that day. Now the con here, the con with cohorts, or I guess with anything, is that if it doesn't sell, if nobody buys before the start date, well, then you're kind of screwed and you have to wait a bit and improve the product before you relaunch. But another thing with that is you can always just reach out to people one-on-one and run them through the cohort curriculum with weekly calls one-on-one and charge 2000 for it instead of 400. So when you build out a cohort style course, you increase your chances at monetization quite a bit. So the best progression, in my opinion, is to, one, build out the cohort and do this week by week. That's what I would recommend is don't build it out until the start of the week. You outline it all. You know exactly what's going to go into it. But don't build it out before people actually start buying. Build the landing page first, start selling it, have the closed enrollment date, have a start date, and then get the first week of curriculum material ready before the start date. And then before the second week, do the second week of material and then so on and so forth. You build it out week by week as people are going through because then you know it's successful and you don't build anything out before you know whether it's worth it and people have been buying. All right, more of a motivational question from Joe is how did you keep believing in what you were doing when times were tough? Now, I've always kind of been good at this, right? Keeping my mind focused on a singular thing or being able to prevent my mind from going too deep into rumination or becoming too turbulent. And that's not to say that I haven't had my bad moments. I mean, I have those all the time. I question what I'm doing a lot. I question if I'm making the right decisions, especially in cortex, where we're spending a lot of money to get that thing built. But the thing here, and when I narrow this down to what I do when I'm in that mindset, like, oh, what if this doesn't work out? What if I'm not making the right decision? So on and so forth. I need to find evidence. I need to find evidence because I don't have evidence that I created myself. I need to prove to myself that it's possible. And you can think of this like when whenever my fiance finds a new food that she wants to try or hears about a food like a kiwi or something exotic, she always looks up on her phone. What are the benefits of eating XYZ food? And then she'll show me and she'll be like, oh, look, this like reduces inflammation. It does this and does this. She doesn't look up the cons, which whatever, but you need to do the same thing to provide evidence and proof for the thing that you're trying to do. Don't get sucked in to this like negative cesspool on the internet telling you that it's not going to work out. You need to find and curate information that persuades you to keep going and gives you strategies and tips to try. You can't let a rogue thought or opinion from someone else where you're lacking context, just take over your mind and make you stop what was supposed to be the thing that was supposed to change your life. What I think here, the problem for most people that lets them go too deep into the turbulence or the negative thought patterns is that they quitting is an option for them. They still have another option in their mind. They still have the job they can go back to. They still have whatever it is. They haven't burned the boats and not that everyone should burn the boats, but if you want to ensure that you don't quit, it's do or die. Now, I could quit Cortex right now and probably be just fine, but I don't want to do that. Honestly, I'm closer to going homeless than I am to quitting Cortex and I've told the team that. I've told them I will go homeless before I let this die and that could be the stupidest thing ever, but that's what my mindset is and I truly feel like that's what's going to help us succeed. And the problem here is that so many people are just used to timeframes. You treat what is supposed to be your life's work as going to college. You're going to graduate someday. There's going to be some form of retirement. You have this conventional thought process in your mind of, "Okay, I graduate high school at this time. I graduate college at this time." It's like these moving goals and achievements and then it's like, "Okay, then I get promoted, then I get married, then I get to retirement, and then I'm free." And then that's what I do when in reality you're free this entire time if you're working on your life's work. You've already reached all of those things. You're focused on refining your quality of life and making the life's work enough to sustain the life you want to live. All right, another question from Sincade, "Will AI make people dumber? How do you use AI to become better?" The first thing I'll recommend here is reading my substack post or eventual YouTube video called The Unpleasant Truth. AI is coming for your job, but I'll give you the cliff notes here. When you look to the past, you can see that around 80% of people were self-employed, the farmers and people of that era, and that's versus the 10% of people today who are unemployed. And also if you look to the past, you can see that the people who were expected to do one thing for the entirety of their lives, which is what we do right now, they were slaves. They were the slaves. Free people, free men, the self-employed individuals in a sense, were supposed to act on their interests and do many things throughout their lives. As we discussed previously in a previous question, AI allows you to do that. You get to focus on the craft that you want to focus on and you have AI to help you in other aspects of the business so you can sustain that as your work going into the future of work where less people are going to be employed by an employer and more of them are going to be self-employed. So with that alone, do I think it makes people dumber? No, I think it will help them develop a more big picture overview of the thing they're trying to do. It makes them transcend a level to become a systems thinker. If they're using it correctly, of course, dumb people using AI are probably going to be more dumb. You can see this in the emails that people send where someone has AI draft up an email that would have taken the same amount of time to just write themselves and then they leave like the last question from the AI in the email that they send where it's like, do you want me to make this more professional or more casual? They include that in the email. It's like people like that. They don't even think they're using AI as a shortcut. So nothing changes here, right? The quick fix attitude, the cheap dopamine attitude, the getting the quick result attitude. I'm not talking about taking a smart shortcut and being smart and getting results faster. I'm talking about you're just being lazy and you're not doing anything worthwhile. You're going to become dumber. But if you have awareness of this, then you're probably fine because when I personally use AI, I'm learning and doing at the same time. When I have AI try to help me do something that I haven't done myself, like I'm figuring out how to I've written a landing page. But when I'm trying to have it write a landing page for me or sales copy or something of that nature, I have to in order for me to get AI to do it well, I have to give it all of the right pieces. I have to understand the principles of something like copywriting. I have to understand how legendary advertisers did that specific thing. I need to understand the best structure for something like a landing page. And then as it's spitting out those responses, I'm learning that at the same time I'm getting a big picture overview of the process so that I can do more and learn more with more of a CEO mindset than an employee mindset. So while I don't think people are going to be smarter at specific skills and how to do them, I think they're going to have a bigger picture awareness of how the puzzle piece looks and they're going to be able to get more results because of that. Now, a last question that I quite like from Elias is once you have a direction you want to go. So you have big goals, you have small goals, the things that we've talked about before, how do you determine lever moving tasks? Now, if you don't know how to do this, I used to give out a life reset template where you could fill it in to figure out your vision, your anti vision, your goals, break them down. But I actually turned that into an AI prompt. So if you go to Cortex, sign up for Cortex, go to chat, go to plan, and then the life reset map, it will ask you questions. So it's a lot easier to formulate what your anti vision and vision is. It's like a guided practice rather than you trying to pull all of these things that you don't know out of your brain and trying to figure it out. So if you don't know what your vision or your hierarchy of goals is, go through that. And this will make a lot more sense because you need to figure out what the levers are. Now levers are things that move the needle there. It's like what is the most impactful action I can take to get the most amount of results. Now in many cases, like especially in the creator economy, the levers are the same. There isn't some like lever that you personally need to find. It's the fundamentals, it's the basics, it's the things that you learn in the social media course. But the difference is in how you do them and how honest you are about how well you do them because most people lie to themselves or they don't understand what error correction is. They don't understand that they are making a mistake that needs to be corrected and that that's an opportunity to learn. So if we take the goal of get a thousand followers, then the levers toward that are going to be the basics. It's going to be replying to large accounts and small accounts to get more eyes on your profile so people go and visit it. But the problem there is that most people don't do that well and they don't know how well they are doing it. You have to actually be aware of these things. When you leave a comment, okay, how many views does it have on the comment itself? How many people have clicked your profile? How many people have followed you from that? The people that think that they're moving levers, they're moving the needle by replying with something like, oh, this is a great post or having AI spam comment sections with posts that are supposed to be written like you but they aren't, you're not going anywhere. In terms of something like creating a YouTube video, the lever usually comes down to the title, the thumbnail and the storyline of the actual video. The technical details like, oh, the b-roll that goes here, the visual that goes here. It's the big picture principles. What makes the thing work? Are you in content? Are you capturing attention? Are you holding attention? Are they getting something out of it? Do they want to like? Do they want to share? Are you thinking about all of these things when you're writing or creating the videos or whatever it may be? If your content isn't doing well, then there's always room for improvement. You don't just write without reflecting on why the last piece of writing or the last video didn't do well. You correct and you get better every single time by asking AI, how can I improve this the next time around? Researching. How do I, what are some strategies for writing better hooks and experimenting with them until you get something right and then you keep going? For something like weight loss, what is the lever? Calorie deficit? Moving. That's the big picture. The technical details is the diet models and people get all caught up in this. Like that's what changes. Yeah, your metabolism can slow down. Yeah, you may have to eat a thousand calories a day because you don't move very much and you're, you've destroyed your metabolism this entire time. Something like that. But you still have to be in a calorie deficit. So if you aren't and you're like, oh, why am I not losing weight? It's because you're not and you're not tracking, you're not measuring the levers and the results from those things. Now, another thing you can do here is one, just fill out the life reset map, give AI the goal that you're trying to achieve and say, what are the main lever moving actions to help me get to this goal? The main things that I need to focus on and talk back and forth with it a bit. So that is it for this Q and A. I'm going to try and do these maybe once a month. If you want to be in the Q and A it is reserved for the paid sub stack members inside of that chat. So there's a link in the description to check that out, but you can also subscribe and get all the free newsletters twice a week as well. You don't need to necessarily participate. So I'll leave it at that links to the sub stack to Cortex, which is the AI tool that I've built and note taking platform where you can use any AI model and you can save responses as documents or notes and you can reference documents, PDFs, sources, YouTube videos, other things like that. So check that out. If you like this video, like it, let me know if you like this format. Thank you for watching. Bye.