Your Greatest Moat is a Beginner's Mind - Ep. 21

Hey and welcome back to another No Trade Secrets Debrief Session. Solo Reflection, where I unpack the lessons, patterns, and ideas that have stayed with me from recent conversations that I've had and just throughout my own journey. Today I want to talk a little about AI. Not from a place of any fear or scarcity, uh, not from hype, not from a place of AI is gonna replace everyone, uh, because at the end of the day, anyone predicting the future um is just giving you their opinion and assessment on where things are, they think things are going. Um and I know there's a lot of fear-mongering and clickbait out there uh that is unfortunately having a negative effect on a lot of people and creating a lot of scarcity when it comes to AI. When I really think that this is uh a huge opportunity that should be looked at, especially by entrepreneurs, as a tool to really grow and create some powerful things and maximize and expand your impact. But today I want to talk about the mistake that I think a lot of people, a lot of smart people are making right now. And that is when it comes to AI, I see kind of two camps of people. Um, one camp is a smaller camp, seemingly, from my perspective, that are those are the people who are using AI, they're experimenting, they're playing, and they're trying to really adopt this new technology as it's coming out, and obviously, like things are progressing so fast, it's almost impossible to keep up with the newest thing that is out as far as AI. But that's one camp of people, and I think that's the small camp, because I see I think the vast majority of people are in the camp of their waiting, uh in the camp of observing. They're also the people that, you know, in these conversations that I'm having are telling themselves that they're behind, and that because they feel behind, they're they further delay getting into the realm of experimenting and playing and testing and using AI. Uh, and but they're delaying the one thing that would actually help them catch up. And so I think the mistake is believing that you need to understand AI before you start using it. When in reality, I think the truth is you start understanding AI and how it works by using it, by play. And so a lot of people that I talk to say that I'm too far behind, that they miss the boat and there's no catching up, and I missed the window. Everyone else has knows how to use this. I don't even know where to start, is another common one. Or it's overwhelming, and I get it because I play and build with AI every single day, and it is still overwhelming to me as well. Or there's there's people also that are uh of the mindset of I'll get into it once things settle down, once there is a clear AI winner, or once something is built for me that makes it easier to get into, not in this kind of you know, Wild West frontier stage. But you know, the truth is like this is just the beginning, and AI is not settling down, the tools will continue changing, models will keep improving, interfaces will keep evolving, and so waiting for stability is actually a strategy for permanent delay, in my opinion. Now, I think we we get we get this misconstrued view where it looks, you know, according to social media and according to X or LinkedIn, that oh, I'm part of the minority who doesn't really know and have how to use it or hasn't really gotten into it. But as with pretty much everything in social media, what you see on your feeds is not necessarily and often not the majority. Because the real adoption picture is more encouraging, I think, to people who are in this kind of scarcity camp. Um, there was a study, I I know that you've probably seen some of the studies, uh, but there was, you know, there was one study in particular in uh in 2025 that said that 34% of all US adults had had ever used Chat GPT or an uh an AI chatbot. Which that means two-thirds of the adult population of the US had never used a Chat GPT or AI chatbot at all. The same study said that among uh employed adults, only 28% said they'd used AI for work. Which that might actually seem like a big portion, but you have to remember that I would go to guess that 90 to 95% of that 28% were just using a free version of Chat GPT as a glorified search engine, you know, basically replacing Google. So, what does that mean is is you're not as behind as you think. The bar is actually extremely low. The goal is not to become necessarily an AI engineer. The bar is really just to start using it. Try real use cases, learn what it's good at, learn what it's not so good at. The way to get into it is to play. That's how I got into it personally. And because I was in that camp probably uh a maybe just under a year ago. And yes, I was using I was using AI uh from you know, really from the glorified Google kind of perspective. And really not much else. And I didn't really understand how it worked, and it was it was actually after I put my team and I through an AI training course with uh a friend of mine's company, Justin Coates, uh, Learn Air is his company, and they teach companies and teams at companies how to use and implement AI into their work. And so my team and I went through this, their their course, uh, their training course with them. I think it was a six-week course session, and where we got to learn the concepts and then we actually got to play with it and use it ourselves. And for me, that was the starting point because then I got to understand a little bit how it works, and once I did that, then you just naturally, if you're a curious person, especially, and as you know, founders, I would go to assume that most of us are curious, you go down this rabbit hole and you just keep expanding, you keep playing, and like I use the word play a lot, but that's literally what I did. And it's playing with different AI apps that come out, and then to fast forward to today, the progression, like I'm not using these companies that build apps using AI. Now I'm I'm building our own internal applications for use cases for to serve our clients and to serve us internally completely from scratch and not paying for other company subscriptions. And that might look like an overwhelming place to get to, and I uh would say yes, it is if you try and do that all in one day, but I got there through playing every day, and because it was fun, you enjoy it more, and I guarantee you like you will find this fun if you start playing, and it really has opened my eyes to what is possible and the crazy incredible time that we live in right now, where literally anything is possible. You if there is something that you can think of, something that you can imagine, there's a good chance that you can build the solution. I mean, we have changed a lot of internal systems and cuts costs from subscriptions just by building replacement tools that work better for us. And that is the key part that I think is the huge benefit, and why I really, really believe that founders need to start playing so they can see this and have this revelation too, is that when you get to that point, you're able to build systems that not only can cut costs for current systems or subscriptions that you're paying for, but they are also better solutions for you. Because, as is in business and life, the right solution for me may not be the right solution for you. And so the software company that releases the product that is trying to be the solution for everyone, it's not there's no software or application out there that is perfect. We we've all we all have this. We wish it could do this, or we wish it did this different, or even just like a different view. Well, I'm a stickler for those kinds of things, and it's great because now I get to cut costs and subscriptions and build the replacement exactly the way me and my team want it to function and want it to work, and it's really quite incredible what you can do. But yeah, it looks overwhelming if you look at it as that from that as the starting point. So the advantage right now is is not technical expertise, it's just the advantage is willingness, the willingness to just play, to the willingness to start. Anyone who can do that will inherently have an advantage in the future over those who are not willing, or who are too scared to start, or feel too overwhelmed. I'm saying this and repeating on this point over and over again just because it is not a technical barrier. The moat is not technical anymore. The things that we've been able to build over the last three months would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay a software engineer to build even just a year ago. I'm not a software engineer, I don't know the first thing about coding, but here we are, and we've built tools that have hundreds of thousands of line of code combined, and I don't know what a single one of them truly really means. You know, I you learn part of it, you know, as you go as well, but with these internal tools, this is amazing. This is this is a cheat code, and so the learning curve is playing. It's AI is not something where you can read a textbook or even really watch YouTube videos to learn. Like those will help you get started, but it's the doing is how you learn. It's it's like it's like an infant learning to walk by trying to walk. It's like learning a language. You you have to the best way to learn a language is to go to that country and experience their culture and experience the language where you're forced to learn the language. You have to feel it, you have to test it, you have to see how it responds, you have to learn how to ask better questions. And so, like some practical examples just to get started, because that's all you need to do is get started, is just start with something super simple. Summarize long articles, draft email responses, drag in a call transcript, and give it a prompt that where you speak to your process of how you would use your own logic to analyze a call transcript from a sales call, for example, to then formulate a proposal. Speak the logic into that, give it the context, give it the data, and just see how it writes the proposal. Role play a sales conversation, pressure test uh a business idea or a new product idea. Compare two different options uh for a decision you have to make. Use the first layer being thought partnership, because then you'll be able to see through having just conversations with it what you're able to do. Another fear that I think people have is like the fear of looking stupid, right? A lot of smart people are avoiding AI because they're used to being competent, and AI might make them feel like a beginner again. And like I get it, that's uncomfortable. Especially when you're dealing with founders and executives or high performers, like they're like that's people that are used to knowing, right? But AI requires the playing before you're able to master. Now, the reason why I think you have to start now, you just it's the advantage is available now to anyone who has the willingness to start playing. Because founders out there, AI is not just a productivity tool. This technology can touch every single part of your business from sales to marketing, finance, operations, hiring, training, customer service, internal documentation, executive decision support, strategic planning. You can use it to turn voice notes into content, draft SOPs, review financials, create onboarding materials, build scorecards and dashboards, to have conversations, to think through pricing. The future is moving in a direction that is not turning back. We're past the point of no return. So being an AI denier is is I think a big mistake because it's not going anywhere. It's only getting better, and it's it is improving faster than any of us can comprehend. And the sooner you can start playing and learning, the sooner you'll be prepared, because I think the landscape of how we do work over the next 12 months is going to look very different pretty soon. Because AI is the value in AI is not about prompting. It's you know, it's about loops, it's about workflows, automations, decision support. Like I think a lot of industries well, I know a lot of industries are have already started to change drastically because of this technology. And from the founders that I speak to that are, in my opinion, in the best position for this new AI revolution that we're already going through, are the ones that are playing with the technology and building and trying and testing things and seeing the limitations. So if you can do one thing, it's just just try. Try it out. Be willing to not know, be willing to be a beginner in something because it is something that once you start, I promise you, you will start growing and learning what's possible so fast, and the biggest hurdle is just getting started, is it's overcoming that initial inertia to get the ball rolling, and then it is all snowball effect from there.