Finding a Mentor and 
 Listener AI Advice

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs, episode 446 for Friday, May 5, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome back to Business Brain here on Casual Friday. Business Brain is of course, the show where we apply our business brain fit filter to various things throughout our lives to get that objectivity, to get a new look on things, and to help us lead our charmed lives. Sponsors for this episode include FactorMeals.com Brain40, where you'll use code Brain40 to get 40% off your first box of America's number one ready to eat meal kit. And also Notion, where you can go to notion.combusinessbrain to try notion AI for free. So we'll talk more in depth about both of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. I feel like we should have some different music for Casual Friday, like some Hawaiian music with a Mai tai or some sort of thing with a margarita on the beach.

Is that on my to do list or your to do list? You're the music guy.

But yeah, I just kind of feel like, oh, this would be kind of cool. Maybe we should, we should, we should switch that up. And I love doing the Friday show. I like doing the shorter shows. And our average consumption numbers are well up now, as you pointed out to me. Yeah, 80s, 80s and above 90s on some shows.

80S and above 90s. We're talking about the, the percentage of the show that is listened to by most of you. When we were doing, when we were looking at this last summer and trying to decide, okay, how do we get more engagement in the show? How do we do what we need to do? We looked at those numbers and, like, they were not good. They were in like 40s, 50s, sometimes 60s on a good show. And it was like, all right, wait, wait, wait. That means that people are only listening to half of an episode. What if we do a half of an episode as an episode? Like, maybe that's the amount of time that people have when they sit to listen to business. Brandon, it turns out you were right. So thank you for telling us that.

Great to see. Yeah, I love it.

Also, thank you to listener Robert, who has our first bit of feedback here. We've been asking about how you use AI in your business, and Robert answered. He says, I use ChatGPT often via Bing, he says, because I like how Bing merges the chat output with links to specific resources for follow up. Okay, great. He says, I use Chat GPT to help for marketing my YouTube channel, ideas for YouTube video titles, ideas for YouTube thumbnail buzzwords. He says I create the first draft text for YouTube's description field that gets posted with every video. And as a YouTube script, he says, I generate an outline on a topic or I generate a YouTube script of XXX words. So feeding ChatGPT build me a script for YouTube of, you know, 500 words or whatever it is. He says I heavily edit the output that I get from ChatGPT or sometimes just use some key points from the output to write my own. Very often it's the list of top 10 reasons to do X or the top 10 advantages of Y has several great points that I never thought about before or had forgotten and would have omitted. This is the way to use chat GPT. By the way, I had a an experience this weekend. I'm terrible at regular expressions. These are like a thing that computers understand that Dave doesn't. Lots of programmers understand them. Many of you listening probably understand regular expressions. I do not. This is what you would use with the command grep if you're super nerdy. I'm super nerdy. These things terrify me. I don't know why. So I groot grep G R E P. I know, yeah. But what I did was I used to chat GPT to generate a regular expression, but I have no ability to tell whether that regular expression is correct or incorrect. And then I posted about it and it turns out it was super incorrect. And my friend Chuck said, you know, it's like this is like Dunning Kruger implemented in software. It's someone who thinks they're right, acts like they're right, speaks with great confidence and is entirely incorrect. And, and it was like, right, I can't use ChatGPT that way. I need to use ChatGPT as an assistant so that I can be the ultimate filter on the end result. And like, I know this, I knew this going in, but I thought I found a shortcut. I did not really. The shortcut was skip the idea of having ChatGPT show me a regular expression. What I asked it was find a regular expression or create a regular expression that will select every other line in a file. So this is, you know, like simple but not, not something that you could script in another way. And what I should have just asked chat GBT is here's a file, select every other line or delete every other line. And you know what? When I did that, it worked fine. Yeah, right. So thinking a little bit like that and like, like, like Robert's saying here going on. Robert says, I use Dall e D a L l e to generate a photograph to use as a background home Office image for YouTube. Oh, interesting. He says for email newsletters and blog posts, I use Dolly or others to generate illustration images instead of spending hours searching stock photo websites or taking my own photos. He says I don't let Chat GPT directly. I don't use anything that chat GPT generates directly. I use it for outlines, brainstorming ideas or a rough first draft.

Yeah, yeah, that works really well. I've been doing similar where you know, it just great to get a starting point. If you're one of those people that need to produce some kind of content versus looking at a blank page, it's really great. You know, you give it the right prompts of what you're looking for and it gives you prompts back to you. Like, oh, that's right, let me write this, I gotta mention this and I have to mention that.

So the more detailed you can be with your prompts for anything, for an image creation especially, but really for anything, the more details you can give it, the better the results are going to be. The more accurate and the more desirable to you the results are going to be. The 1:1 part of Robert shared a bunch of stuff here. He says one of the things is, he says Dall e for image generation, Dolly's image results aren't that great right now. He says, but I'm not looking for photorealistic pixel perfect results. Mid Journey is much better. But the way you have to interact with Mid Journey is using Discord. It's really difficult. I gotta get better with it. But he also says the Adobe Firefly beta is very good. So I need to dig more into that.

Yeah, you know, the Canva one is good too.

He mentions that as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well the thing I like, he shares a lot of great data.

He does, yeah.

But one of the things he says towards the end is, he says, you know, just like the early evolution of websites and web marketing, you need to have some hands on experience as things get going. So when you do hire someone, a freelance or consultant to help you, you're not going to get taken advantage of. You'll know some of the lingo, you know, you'll know if they try to promise you the world, you know, you're going to be able to vet someone and get the results that you're looking for, which, you know, you may not be interested in AI right now, but it is going to be Interested in you.

Yeah, he shares two other. Two other things. One is, he says his favorite AI tool to test is Summarize Tech, which is, he says it's a mashup of. Of video transcription and chat GPT. You give it a URL to any YouTube video and it generates a text summary of the entire video. So you know when you're searching for how to do something and you find a video and you're like, ah, dude, I don't have 15 minutes to watch your video. I wanted to just get a text, you know, a text description of how to do that. Well, now summarize Text will do it. Summarize Tech will do it. The last thing that I'll share from Robert's note here, and yes, Robert gets entered into our drawing to win a MacBook Air this year, is he says the lesson is, as Steve Jobs said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a product. And this is true, right? AI right now is an assistant, but it is not something standalone. You need to. You need to manage it. And with that, though, it can make a huge, huge difference for your business. All right. Hey, look, like many of you out there, we have found that Notion, our sponsor today, is great for making notes and docs and project management. Right? And so today I'm really excited to tell you about the incredible newest addition to Notion's suite of tools, Notion AI. Yeah, artificial intelligence that works right in your Notion workspace. Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. And this is because, like I said, you get to leverage the power of AI right inside Notion across all your notes and docs without the need to jump between your work and like a web browser or a separate AI powered tool, Notion AI is designed to help you with your work right in the place where you're doing your work. So not in a separate tool. So with whatever you're working on, Notion AI lets you skip to the good part. Just tell Notion AI what to do. The more details, the better. Of course. That's what we've learned with AI, right? And then you can have it write a blog post, make an outline, brainstorm ideas, summarize a whole bunch of docs for a limited time, try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.combusinessbrain that's all lowercase letters, notion.com businessbrain to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you support our show. This is a limited time offer. Try Notion AI for free right now at notion.com businessbrain and our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. And during this prime spring season, we have here you need wholesome, convenient meals to energize you for warmer, more active days. To help you get through your to do list and make it your to did list, our sponsor Factor, America's number one ready to eat meal kit, can help you fuel up fast with ready to eat meals delivered straight to your door. Factor's great. We've used it here a bunch. At home. You get to skip the trip to the grocery store. You skip the chopping, the prepping and the cleaning up too. Because factors fresh never frozen meals are ready in just two minutes. So all you have to do is heat and enjoy. Then you can get back to whatever you were doing right. It's great. They really make it easy. And it's all fresh ingredients. They're delicious. They're ready when you need them. And they've got all kinds of menus for different lifestyles and diets. They've got keto to calorie smart vegan and veggie protein pl all prepared by chefs and approved by dietitians. They got all the ingredients you need to feel satisfied all day long. While getting that to do list done, head to FactorMeals.com brain40 and use code BRAIN4.0 to get 40% off your first box. That's code BRAIN40@FactOrMeals.com brain40 to get 40% off your first box. And our thanks to Factor for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, we have another email today from listener Akeens who asks a simple question. He says, I love the show. That's great. That's not a question, that's a statement. And we love it. Thank you. We love you for loving the show. I was wondering, he continues, do you have an episode on business mentors or a business coach and how we can go about finding one? Yeah, the answer is yes, we will. And we have more to share on that. But I will say that really, you know the default piece of advice when I get this? Well, it's twofold. Number one is think about who you might know who's running a business that's similar enough to yours or who might have experience like yours, a friend that you can, you know, preferably someone like. It probably makes sense that this would be someone who's older than you, but certainly someone who has been in business longer than you and ask that person if they will be your mentor. If you don't have that person or if you do and they're not quite giving you everything that you think you need. Score, where you can go to score.org and find a mentor. This is through the SBA, and it is free and fantastic. Made a huge difference in my life. The. I don't know, I spent about six months with score. I probably should have spent longer. Maybe it's. Maybe it's something to go back to.

But really great organization.

It's a great organization. Yeah. It makes a.

And I think your point about.

Yeah.

Reaching out. You know, there's a story, famous story of Steve Jobs called, you know, one of the. I think it was Bill Hewlett or Bill Packard.

Yeah.

From Hewlett Packard.

Yeah.

He was like a little kid, teenager. Asked him for some parts. I'm trying to make this. Da, da, da, da. Went over there, got the stuff he needed, and they hired him as an intern and, you know, made tons of connections. And the. The moral of the story is that most people don't pick up the phone. Most people don't ask. And, you know, if you're sincere, you're not trying to sell them something. You're like, you know, can I talk to you for five minutes? Can I buy. If they're local, can I buy a cup of coffee? I have some questions. You know, most people that have had some success want to help. And I'm not talking about people pushing coaching services and this kind of stuff. Cause, you know, you can find those and pay for those. But I'm just talking about somebody. It doesn't have to be in your industry, but somebody who's been successful in business that surely certainly would be glad to give you a little bit of their time.

Yeah, yeah. That's the key, is just say, hey, look, you know, I don't want to take up a ton of your time, but I'm hoping that you might, you know, and maybe even start. A good way to get in. In with someone, but also a good way for you to vet them is to come with something specific. Hey, I'm having a specific problem like. And it. It could and in fact should be something simple. And I hate the word should. I dislike the word should. I also dislike the word hate because it communicates like words mean something. I'm trying to. I'm trying to change my vocabulary. And. And the word hates, one of those things. So I dislike the word should. I think it might work best in most cases if it's something simple. How's that for a long winded way of saying something?

Well, it also Goes to it being brief.

Brief. Well, that's it. You don't want to show up and say, hey, I'm having a real trouble with my business. I have no idea what to do. Can you help me?

That is, I need a mentor.

Yeah, I need a mentor. Don't start with that unless it's somebody you already have a good relationship with, in which case that's exactly the right way to start. Start with, I'm trying to figure out which bank to use. What bank do you use and why did you pick them and would you pick them again? Would you recommend them or would you recommend something different for this type of business? I have. Right. And that's a simple question for someone to answer. You might wind up getting a very long and detailed answer, but when you do, it's their choice to give you a long and detailed answer. Right. You're asking a simple question, but it allows you to check out how, first of all, how that person responds and how you resonate with their advice. Because you want someone that has more experience than you but also thinks enough like you that their advice fits for you. If somebody says, oh, I only will ever use one of the largest banks in the world because that's all I've ever learned and that's what I want now, if that resonates with you, great. If that's like, if you're like, well, that's not a good reason to use a bank. Like, but don't you have some critical thinking to apply?

Right.

Well, then maybe that's not the right person to ask to be your mentor. So go ask somebody else. Hey, what bank do you use? In fact, maybe that's a good litmus test question. What bank do you use with your business? Like, it's not a bad question to ask. You'll learn a lot about an entrepreneur by hearing their answer to that question.

Yeah. I think you also need to do your homework. If you're reaching out to someone you don't know, don't have a relationship, when you either. Before you start that, try and make that connection, you should know their background, what they're, you know, are they in a similar business or industry or vertical, you know, that you're in, so you can speak, you know, and show that you've done a little background and you know, what, you know what their history is a bit. That'll help you in that, that conversation as well.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you go to businessbrain show and just search for the word mentor, you'll find a bunch of episodes where we've discussed it ourselves between Dave and I or had guests on the show that talked about mentorship that in that they've used or how they've mentored other people. And specifically in episode 398, you know, about seven months ago, we talked about ways to find a mentor that I think will be helpful for you.

Hopefully. Hopefully. But if you have a question, send it into us. Feedbackusinessbrain Show. We are happy to get your questions. We are also happy to answer them, but we are truly happy to get your questions. And if you can't find a mentor, we're right here, me and Shannon, happy to help. If it winds up being a thing that goes on long term, great. If it's just a quick little thing, great. We'll figure it out together. But reach out to us. We're right here. We might not understand your business. We might understand it perfectly. We're to going knows there's one way to find out. Like Shannon said, ask thanks for hanging out with us folks on Casual Friday. Thanks for have a great weekend. Yeah, thanks for sending in your questions. Of course you can be like Robert in Akeens and get entered into our drawing to win a MacBook Air this year here in 2023 simply by sending in a question to feedbackusbrain show. If we feature it, you get entered in. Like Shannon said, had a great weekend. Have a great weekend. Living that charmed life.