Attention Is All You Need: The Real Path to AI Mastery At Work

Step into a world where machines dream, AI whispers secrets never seen, tomorrow glows bright on the screen, future unfolds, come join the team.

Welcome to the AI for the Win podcast. This is a podcast for business professionals who who want to win using AI at work. This is a podcast for business professionals who refuse to become irrelevant in the age of AI. A podcast for people who want to explore the possibilities of their own human potential. This podcast is for those who choose instead to lead, to innovate, and to dominate In the AI age. Welcome to AI for the Win podcast. My name is Enrico Schaefer, and we're going to dive in today to what I think is the most important thing you need to know as a business professional in order to 10x your abilities, in order to become part of the AI elite in 2025. If you're here, it means you understand one thing. You don't think that learning how to expand your potential using AI is an optional skill. No. The fact that you're here tells me that you understand how important AI and the skills that you need in order to effectively engage with AI is the most important thing in your professional life. It has been for the last 12 months, and if you haven't already been diving in, there are people in your industry, in your profession who are already leaving you in the dust. I know because I use these AI tools as a power user every day as an attorney, and there are few, if any, other attorneys who can compete with me, not because I'm better than them, but because I am empowered by AI. The level of output, the quality of output that I can generate in a day is unparalleled. I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what my capabilities are. And as a result of the skills, the methodology and strategy, and the mindset that I bring to my computer each morning as I sit down to do my work, engaging with AI tools all day long, is on many tasks, 2x what I was ever capable of doing in my career. On many other tasks, 5x, and on some tasks, 10x what I was ever capable of doing before. So you're here, you believe that mastering these AI tools will divide those who will win and those who, quite frankly, are already fading into the background. of your job, of your profession, of your industry. You believe that the time is now and that the AI elite are already leaving their competitors in the dust. This podcast is about cutting through the noise, getting straight to the core of what it takes to 10x your potential, to 10x your productivity, And to 10x your creative output. I want to talk to you today about the biggest hurdle to becoming part of the AI elite. One flaw in your approach to AI that's quietly, almost insidiously, keeping you from 2x, 5x, and 10xing your abilities as a professional. What is it? It's the fluff, the clickbait, and the noise around the business case for using AI at work. It's the constant barrage of AI news articles, press releases, software announcements, and new AI tools launching every week that makes you weak. If you're not careful, the BS around AI can paralyze you into inaction, can drown you in decision fatigue. It's going to keep you trapped in a loop of superficial AI experimentation. This, what I call noise around the use of AI in the workplace especially, it isn't progress, it's distraction. So every time you read another headline or ad about the newest AI breakthrough or the AI tools for lawyers you must try, you're losing focus. Every time you download a new AI app or sign up for another AI beta, you're siphoning off your most precious resource. The most important asset you own in the age of AI, the foundation of how you will think about and use AI at work, at home, in your life. What is this one asset that you already own that is going to make the biggest difference in your business, in your professional success in the future? The answer's going to seem obvious when I tell you it, but it's not obvious. In fact, it's something that we really don't think much about. In the age of AI, it is all we should think about. This magic asset, this commodity of yours that's innate to who you are as a human being is your attention. I have a sticker on my computer that captures the essence of intelligence and infinite potential. Let me say that again, intelligence and infinite potential. That's what I'm after every single day. I'm after expanding my intelligence beyond anything that was possible before. And it's about my potential as a business professional, which after 30 years, I understand my potential. I understand how good I can be. and how good I am at so many different aspects of my job as intellectual property, as a technology attorney. But guess what? That defined potential, which maybe you could push on, on the margins before AI, that potential may now be infinite. Your potential may now be infinite. And if it's not infinite yet, it's certainly expanded. And that's what we mean when we say 2x, 5x, 10x. We're expanding exponentially our abilities, our human potential, our business and professional potential. That's why there will be winners and losers in the age of AI. That's why people are already being left behind. And that is why in 2025, The division between those who know how to use these tools and those who don't is going to start to become extremely apparent. There will be people you know in your business, in your profession, whether you're a CEO, a manager, an entrepreneur, an inventor, a creative, a worker, doesn't matter. If you know how to use these AI tools to their maximum ability and you do it with the right mindset and you come at it for the right reason and you know why, the why you are doing it, you will become part of this class of people who will dominate the world, AI-enabled, knowing how to use AI tools. So yes, I do believe that human potential is expanding through the use of currently available AI tools right now. And it's It's really expanding my potential, your potential, everyone's potential is expanding at an unprecedented rate in an unprecedented way in the entirety of human history. So did computers make us potentially better? Did they add to our potential? Yes. And let's just assign a number, 2x. Maybe they made us 2x more efficient, but did they make us 2x smarter? No. No. Did the internet and all the information on the internet make us smarter? Well, I think we could take a look around right now based on what's happening in the world and realize that the internet, even though it has knowledge available to us, all we have to do is Google search it, it's made us dumber in many ways. It has made us lazy. Instead of reading the article, determining if the article is credible, seeing if there are other articles, comparing from an intellectual standpoint which information is better sourced, seems and is more accurate. We just look at the headline. We look at the clickbait designed to grab our eyeball, to grab our— oh, there's that word again, attention, right? Attention is all you need because guess what? Facebook, Meta, Google, they already figured out 15 years ago that attention is the biggest, baddest, most precious commodity in the universe. And they have monetized your attention. They have manipulated your attention for 15 years. And of course, we all realize that now. Well, think about that. They knew it. They knew attention is the most important thing. But did we? We were probably pretty angry. We were giving it away and not getting paid for it. But in the age of AI, when intelligence is available, where it's not clickbait headlines, it's real information. It may not be perfect, but it is the most perfect intellectual information, analytical information that we've ever had available to us, where you could become an expert at just about anything in ways that are exponentially more, more fill in the blank, more everything than YouTube, right? You used to be able to say, oh, go to YouTube, you can become a neurosurgeon. There's a YouTube video for that. True. This is so far beyond. So access to intelligence by AI, like text chat, whether or not you're typing in words or you're dictating words or you're now talking to the AI and the AI is having a conversation back with you, access to intelligence by AI is already here. And man and machine are becoming more and more connected each month. And that is The path by which you will increase your own potential. So here are the most important 5 words you need to know in order to level up with AI. Attention is all you need. This phrase is the title of a groundbreaking 2017 research paper by Google, by Google, the people at Google Brain that introduced Something called the transformer model. You don't need to know a lot about how AI works, but this is kind of important because it's, this is not how AI works. This is how you work. This is how you are going to become more rather than less as a result of AI. This is how the people who engage with AI are going to become part of this new class, this new AI elite, the people who will run the world. The attention is what is going to make the difference. You could be inattentive and you could use AI to do the work for you and use it as a cheat, shortcut it, like a kid in school who's just having the AI write the paper but not interacting with the AI, not questioning the AI, not directing the AI, not exploring and expanding their own knowledge with the AI. That's the difference. That's the difference between the winners and losers. Are you engaged with the AI? Are you giving it your full attention? So Google Brain, 2017, they introduced this paper, pretty short paper, and it introduced the transformer model, which turned out to be a revolutionary architecture for building AI using large language models, LLMs. The transformer, it replaced these older, more rigid models that were more like algorithms. That were if-then logic, right? And it got rid of all of that. There is nobody, there's like 20 lines of code that control every transformer in the neural network of an AI model, 20 lines of code, and only 2 of them matter. That is where AI intelligence is coming from. 2 lines of code in hundreds of millions, billions of transformers. In the AI architecture. So what do these transformers do is they weigh the importance of different pieces of information, and then it's a structure that uses an attention mechanism to be able to determine whether one word is important in relation to another, one phrase is important in relation to another. And oh, it sounds simple, but maybe that is human intelligence. That's what we do all day. Talk, think, talk, think, talk, listen, think, talk. That's what AI does. So this transformer approach gave AI systems the ability to understand context and nuance and relationships at a scale never seen before. It was this innovation that paved the way for today's powerful AI tools like ChatGPT. But beyond AI, this phrase, attention is all you need, embodies a profound truth, a universal truth. Which AI reminds us as the foundation of all human achievement. So this is not a new idea. Oh, if you give something your attention, you're going to be good at it. We've known that forever, right? But how much time do we spend thinking about it? Right? Is that the core of our existence, our interaction with information at work? No. We know distraction's bad, but how much attention do we pay to attention? Attention is the key to unlocking human potential. AI allows us to expand our human potential, but we cannot expand that potential without attention. How we interact with the AI tools all day long is mission critical. So in business creativity and in life, the ability to focus with precision, kind of directing your mental energy where it matters most, It's what has driven innovation and productivity and exponential growth for years. The difference now is that we're driving a Maserati or a spaceship to Mars, right? We've gone from riding a bike to having this insane tool available to us. And so if we focused our attention on pushing on the pedals and riding to the store, boy, we could get there 3 times faster than if we ran. But now, on a rocket ship that is AI, if we put our attention into that rocket, attention being the fuel that drives that rocket, we can go further than we ever imagined was possible before. Let me say it again. Attention is all you need. Master your attention and you will master your potential. When interacting with AI, you have a choice to be lazy or engaged, to let AI do the work for you or Push your abilities and work product to exponential heights. Mindset is everything in the game of AI. And let's just take this down to a practical level. You sit down at your computer in the morning and you begin work. What are you doing? You're reading emails, you're responding to emails. I use AI at every single juncture of my workflow all day long. And the way I'm approaching my work as a result of that The fact that I'm trying to make the work product better, I'm trying to learn more, I'm trying to understand more, I'm trying to take mountains of information and synthesize it down into a paragraph. AI allows me to do all of that. My mindset is that it can do that, and I am going to attentively engage with AI in order to expand the potential of my work product. That mindset that you bring to your computer, your keyboard, your mouse every morning and All day long is everything in the game of AI. The mindset you bring to your computer, your cell phone, the way you approach your work, your goals, and your potential, these things define the limits of your success. The mindset, and this is important, the mindset that got you to this amazing point in your career is no longer the mindset that will propel you into the AI-driven future. What you think you know, you must give up. You have to change the way you think about your work, the work you do, your own potential, the potential of your company. In this kind of crazy new age that we're already in, it just, I don't know how else to say it except you need to rethink everything. When you sit down in that chair in the morning, you need to rethink every single thing that you have ever done by way of habit and approach, because AI, the capability of AI only gets unleashed if you put a whole new business process, a whole new workflow, and a whole new mindset in place as you work throughout the day. It's going to help you in how you work and how you create and how you solve problems and even how you think about human potential itself. So mindset is one of the 4 foundational elements to becoming one of this class of AI-enabled professionals that's going to dominate. It's the cornerstone of transformation. Without the right mindset, one that embraces, for instance, just take it down to a practical level. What are you talking about, Enrico? What kind of mindset? So when you sit down in your chair in the morning, are you thinking That you now have the ability to be curious about anything you don't know. Because before, I'll tell you what, you didn't know it. You're going to go to the shelf. You're going to do the internet research, try and figure it out. No, who has time for all that? You don't need time. Not that much to now be an expert on just about anything. So mindset, do you come at your desk in the morning embracing curiosity? Because if you don't, you won't engage with AI to become an expert before that call with your client, to understand your client's point of view by inputting all their background information before the call. You won't be curious about the people you interact with, the relationships that you can grow. You won't be curious about your own human potential. Without the right mindset, You're not going to be adaptable. Well, adaptability seems pretty damn important in the age of AI since you now need to change potentially 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years of work habits into something brand new, something that hasn't even been defined yet in your world, but you need to be able to adapt to this new way of approaching work. Without the right mindset and the relentless pursuit of growth, it doesn't matter how much skill or strategy you have in engaging with AI. Without the right mindset, no amount of skill or strategy will carry you forward. Mindset, mindset is everything, and it's time to upgrade yours. Just as Transformers revolutionized AI by introducing attention mechanisms, allowing models to focus on the most relevant information and weigh that piece of data's importance. Your attention, your ability to weigh what is relevant and what is irrelevant in relation to the problem you're facing is equally important. And it's going to play a similar role in your professional and personal growth. In Transformers, these attention vectors is what they were called. They gave rise to what can be described as a semblance of intelligence, the ability to process context. Relationships and nuance. And I'm not so sure that's not exactly what our brains are doing each day as we listen, think, and talk, just like these AI tools do. But without this directed focus, even the most powerful models would generate incoherent output. The attention vector made these tools Exponentially better. So exponential that even the people who created these transformers and trained these models cannot tell you what is happening in that middle neural network of the computer network, the transformer layers. They can't tell you what's happening. They don't know why it's able to do what it does. So that's pretty powerful. And I think that where you direct your attention determines the trajectory of your growth and it sets the boundaries of what you can achieve. And if your attention is scattered, your progress will be fragmented. But when your attention is focused and strategic, zeroing in on skills and tasks and goals that matter most, you create the conditions for exponential growth. So I want to stop for a second and say this. Don't think about AI as, oh, I'm going to go use ChatGPT in order to draft this or to learn this. That's really not the way that you need to approach these AI tools. You need to ask this question, how can I become an expert At fill in the blank using AI? How can I expand my potential beyond anything I thought was humanly possible 2 years ago by using these AI tools? How can I become part of this new class of AI-enabled people who will run the world 12 months, 24 months, 36 months from now? In essence, attention is like, it's the mechanism that transforms potential into intelligence and productivity and mastery. And you need to master the art of directing your attention when you engage with these AI tools. And if you do so, if you attentively engage with the AI tools, you're going to unlock the ability to thrive in the age of AI.