Last night, my wife threw up her hands in frustration.
"I need to find an app that can speak in French to help Jaxton study his words."
Hold my beer, I replied. (Instead, I was drinking sparkling water, and I gently put it on the table)
Within about ten minutes, I had built a webpage that featured my son's quiz words for the week with a female voice speaking French, and then giving the answer in return. Jax is now able to hear the French sentence and then, in turn, speak back in French to prove he has the right answer.
I sent her the link, and the two of them were off to the races to study.
Ten minutes, and I built something that can be customized, it was essentially free, and it is adaptable to each new week's vocabulary.
We are living in the single greatest period of time, and if you are not embracing the tools that are at your disposal, you are missing out and being left behind.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said, "Scott, everyone has access to the tools, so everyone is going to be using them," to which I replied, "Wrong." Only the curious ones, the smart ones, the ones who want to be different, think differently, and stand out will be using them, and believe it or not, that's probably about 10% of the population.
If you're not currently leveraging Claude to be smarter with your workflows, you're missing out. I know right away how sophisticated you are with AI if you respond to me with something like, "I use the free version of ChatGPT." Then immediately, I know you're trying, but you're lagging way behind. If you tell me you have a paid ChatGPT account, then great, it tells me you're curious enough to be using the platform more than others, maybe.
But if you rattle off four or five AI tools you use on a daily basis, with paid accounts then now we're talking, and if you start telling me about connections to your gmail, custom GPT's you've built, and or Claude bots that are making your day to day smarter, faster, and easier then we're really going to have a fun conversation.
The key here is just not to be afraid of its capabilities. I find so many people are almost afraid to sit down and start the conversation with these tools and to learn what they can do. I don't think it's a Terminator 2: Judgment Day type of situation with Cyberdyne Systems; it's a fear of the unknown and a fear of change.
The second tip I will give you is to just be patient with learning it. Start talking to the systems, ask questions, learn what is possible, tell them about your workflow, your day, your job, and more. You don't know what you don't know, and AI doesn't know what it doesn't know about you. You have to be willing to iterate over and over before you finally get things right, and before you can finally learn what is possible.
The people who lean into this early, who are willing to look a little awkward while they figure it out, who ask the “dumb” questions and click around without a perfect plan, are quietly separating themselves from everyone else. This has nothing to do with intelligence; it has to do with the desire and the ability to want to learn. They are willing to sit in that uncomfortable space of not knowing and push through it anyway. That gap you’re seeing between people right now? It’s all about curiosity.
I’m not telling you to go build some crazy app tonight or automate your entire life before dinner. I’m telling you to start. Open it up. Ask it something real. Give it context about your job, your challenges, and the things that slow you down every single day. Let it help you think. Let it help you move a little faster. Because once you start to see what’s possible, you don’t go back. You can’t. It’s like flipping a switch, where suddenly you realize how much time you were wasting doing things the hard way.
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, and it’s the only one that really matters. A year from now, when everyone else is still talking about AI, dabbling here and there, saying they “should probably get into it more,” where are you going to be? Still watching from the sidelines, or the one building, testing, learning, and quietly pulling ahead while nobody’s paying attention?
Want to see how much career you have left? Check out my career clock.