After 10,000 Hours of AI, I'd Only Teach You 3 Things

I've spent over 10,000 hours with AI tools, using them, exploring with them, building a business around them. And at this point in a live setting, I've taught well over 100,000 people. If you look at the YouTube channel, over 30 million people. And here's the thing, to be completely honest, 90% of what I learned doesn't matter anymore. It's outdated, replaced by a new tool, a new technique, a new way to work. But the 10% that's left, that's what I want to share today. Not a another tool, not another prompting technique, not another workflow or thing to pay attention to, but the principles behind getting actually proficient at this. Fluent, not just confident at using AI in your everyday life, your business, your processes, all of that. I know that's the reason why a lot of people get into this space. The reason a lot of people open YouTube, go on Twitter, subscribe to newsletters. They want an understanding of how to apply it for themselves and how to apply it in their business and in their career. But the problem is you go online and it's noise. The internet is noise when it comes to AI. Every creator pushes their version of what is the next game-changing thing. Every news outlet pushes the latest PR release of the big tech companies so they can push their valuations further. And it makes sense. But the consumer at the end of the day, the individual gets left behind, gets overwhelmed, gets frustrated with the fact that they keep trying, keep consuming, but there's no real progress. Anybody else feels like they're consuming it all, but really nothing is changing in the way they operate? I know I've been there so many So many times I know so many people get stuck at a certain point where they're like, I don't know what's next. And it's not you, it's not your mistake. It's the system. It's not designed to actually grow your skill, grow your capability, grow your systems. It's designed to hype the latest thing. And I'm guilty of that too. Heck, I mean, here I'm creating content on YouTube, oftentimes covering the latest and greatest. But let me tell you, all of these outlets, they have one thing in common. They have this subtext of, hmm, you need to learn AI. And then you land on a channel like this or somewhere else on the internet. And you're like, okay, I'm ready to do it. You know, you roll up your Sleeves, you create your chat account, you upgrade, you start learning, you consume videos, all of that. But the problem is that it's so fragmented, right? Nobody tells you what to learn in what order. And it's not because they don't care, but oftentimes the time horizon is just too short. The creators focus on getting views today. That's how the game works. That's what the algo is optimized for. But as I said, I've seen this pattern so many times at this point that I kind of like zoomed out and looked at the bigger picture. And then I looked at the results that all the students who were successful have gotten, and they have one thing in common. And that one thing I capture it in this 3-level framework. I call this the Pyramid of AI Progression. And that's a core topic of today's video. Usually I do how-to videos, right? I share my screen, I show you the step-by-step. But this is really more about the high level of how to think about progressing with AI if this is actually something you want to implement in your life, whether it's work or personal. And together with the team, I turned it into visuals. So have a look at it. It's quite simple. I call it the 3 levels of AI. Okay, so here are the 3 levels. And we begin at the bottom, AI for answers. This is where everybody begins. As soon as you create a ChatGPT account or Claude account, whatever it might be, you're using AI as basically a fancy Google. You type in questions that you have and you get answers immediately. It's useful instantly. And then maybe you go to these basic use cases like writing emails and generating ideas and creating meal plans. All of that is amazing. You're basically creating answers to questions in your head. In other words, you're actively solving problems. Now, there's nothing wrong with this level at all. Instantly you're getting time savings. You're getting more leverage in your life by doing that, right? It's faster than a Google search. It does things that you couldn't do otherwise, like writing an email. But essentially, you're just answering questions. And usually people at this level, they just have this feeling of like, there must be more. There's nothing wrong with AI for answers with this first level. But that feeling is correct. There's definitely more. But what often happens is they often look all the way to the top of the mountain to this third level, AI working for you. And we'll get to that connecting tissue in a second here. But they look at AI working for you, they look at the term of an AI agent, And they want that. And it makes sense. It's so human, right? Like, oh my God, I could save energy, save time, have more leverage in my life if I just had an agent doing the work for me. It's just so intuitive, right? Like people just instantly get it. It's like having an extra employee at the cost of $20 a month or something. That's just something everybody wants and everybody grasps, whether that's from all the sci-fi novels in the past or just basic human imagination. An agent is just something people want. And they usually try to jump from AI for answers straight to AI agent working for me. That's the third level, AI working for you. Now, here's the problem. If I were to compare it to human relationships, it's like going on a first date with a girl and then marrying her instantly. Like, does that have a good success rate? Absolutely not. How about you guys get to know each other first, see if you're compatible, maybe learn about each other a little bit, build a real relationship, and then decide if you want to spend the rest of your life together. Now, that's just an analogy, but the truth of the matter is people do that all the time, right? They get into AI, they start doing these basic things, and immediately they're like, oh my God, let me check out Claude Code. Let me check out, oh my God, Cloud Cowork. What is this? I can schedule workflows. I'm going to buy a Mac Mini and run my own cloud bot. This is going to be incredible. They go down that rabbit hole. The rabbit hole might be even fun. I'm not denying that. But what I'm talking about is here, like long-term, really measurable results in your personal life, in your work life, where you just objectively have so much more leverage where you couldn't imagine a reality before this radical change. That's what I'm talking about. And when you do this jump from level 1 to level 3, usually doesn't work. I see it all the time, right? Like people get hyped by the latest greatest, especially lately. Now everybody's like buying Mac Minis and learning Claude code and figuring things out and connecting MCPs and doing all this stuff. And then I won't even ask you to leave a comment because some people will be like embarrassed by the fact that it's the reality of it. But a lot of people do this transition. They go to this goal of having an agent. And one month later, they're at exactly the spot where they were at before. Again, back to using AI for answers. And none of these automations or agentic systems are actually running parts of their life. Now, this is very common, but the mistake is, again, not you. It's how AI is kind of handled on the internet these days. It's how the latest and greatest thing is always hyped up, but there's no conversation around, all right, so this thing exists now, but let's talk about where you're at for a second. And let's talk about how to bridge that gap, because that gap is very real. We're not in 2023 anymore, where you kind of just pick up ChatGPT and start prompting something and get into it. There's so much more now. And by the way, all of this is kind of talking to a mostly non-technical consumer. If you're building a startup or you are a developer, you have a lot of these prerequisites to go, you know, straight to Agentic and figure things out. But for most people, for most people that do not come from a deeply technical background, there is a progression. And that progression is from level 1, AI for answers, to level 2, AI as daily work partner, which we can talk about now. And then eventually they level up from level 2 to level 3, AI working for you. Now, what is this level 2 about and why is it essential to eventually get to level 3? Well, AI as a daily work partner, the idea is really context management. It's context on you, it's context on your goals, it's context on your fears, on things that you accomplished, but also on what your life is set up like and what you like doing. And I added different applications and use cases at these 3 levels. But I really want to point out one thing. For anybody who's at level 1, don't even bother with an app outside of the main LLM. What I mean by that is just pick one, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI and get good at that and start saving your context in an extra document, information about your identity and other things that are irrelevant uniquely to you so that you can provide it to the AI so that at level 2, you can eventually get answers that wouldn't make sense to anybody else on this planet. That's the goal, getting an answer that is so customized that it's uniquely useful to you. And that's when AI turns from this AI for answers machine to a daily work partner. And there's this keyword in there, daily. I think that's kind of the key and the prerequisite to even looking at level 3. If you can't use naked ChatGPT in a way that you're using 7 days a week, don't think about getting an agent. Sure, you can look at some of the content as like, okay, this is interesting, but don't try to get your hands dirty. More likely than not, you will get burned, frustrated, and then have a resistance to even trying it again. Although the value there today is real. The cool thing at level 2 is that things like drafting documents that might seem intuitive at level 1 is like, okay, I'm just using it for answers. It doesn't have deep context on me, but I can draft documents. Well, you can, but they're probably like 60 to 70% done. Whereas if it has enough context, you'll get like 90 to 95% of the way done. It's a different world than whatever you do really. And the main thing is that if your goal is to get to level 3 where AI is working for you, which I believe that is the goal of most people watching this channel, I think living at level 2 is completely fine. There's so much there. And level 3 is changing day to day. It really keeps developing so fast. But the key to get from level 2 to level 3 is you both being confident in your usage, but also being fluent with the tools. And if that's the case, then you're gonna be using them daily. I don't care what you're doing. And if you're using them daily, you're also building context, whether that's through the memory feature, or hopefully you curating it manually into files. If you have that, then you can try all of the Gentek stuff, which, you know, pressing the buttons isn't hard, but making it work and finding the use cases and making the output of those use cases high quality enough so that it even becomes worth your time. A document that is only 50% of the way done wastes more time than it saves me. It's not worth using AI for. A document that is 80% of the way done, 90%, yes, sign me up. I'm okay with finishing the last 10%. Saves so much time. And then the fun thing is that at level 3, everything that you made work before, you can now put a system in place where it's truly automated. It triggers without your presence. You can be sleeping and the use cases that you found earlier with the right context attached to it just run by themselves. And the outputs are actually useful. Sort of just getting a faster car, but if the GPS is broken in the car, then there's no point in having a faster car. You're going in the wrong direction, but just going really fast now. So in other words, level 3, where AI working for you, it's really just about accelerating what you already discovered. And if you haven't discovered anything, don't bother venturing into that territory and get good first. Now we're really taking this framework and building the entire AI Advantage ecosystem around it. Whatever we teach now, we think about it through this lens. And if people start at level 1, we make sure that they're damn solid at level 2 before we dare to enter level 3. And I hope that this is also going to be helpful on your journey. Now, we actually think this educational framework and these ideas are so valuable that we designed an entire 3-day summit, 3 hours a day for 3 days straight. Incredible guests: Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Ray Kurzweil, Arthur Brooks, so many more incredible guests, including me, speaking about this exact framework and doing teaching sessions outside of that, all completely for free. Well, later this week, April 23rd through 25th, if you want, there's a link below in the description. You can come watch me talk, you can come watch the whole event. Again, it's completely free to participate. And now that you know this framework, I can tell you that the event is designed for level 1 and level 2 people. And this channel oftentimes is, well, level 3, sometimes level 1, sometimes level 2. But from here on out, I'll be able to reference this so you can contextualize everything that I might be teaching, showing off with this map of AI so that you can understand that, hey, if we're looking at a level 3 thing, this might be interesting to me, but I have some work left to do before I dive into the deep end of the pool just to find myself wondering why I'm struggling to stay afloat. Well, the reason is that you should learn swimming first, which is level 2, before you go into the deep end. So ultimately, I'll leave you with this: if you self-identify as level 1 or level 2, you don't need another video, you don't need another tutorial. You need to go use the tool, and you need to consciously think about what the context is that you're giving it. And then ultimately, if you're comfortable at level 3, there is a thing that we call level 3+, which would be all that madness that is OpenClaw. But I would never invite you to try that if you're not comfortable at level 3 yet. Fun thing is now with this in place, I kind of gave myself permission to create level 3+ content without overwhelming the people who are just getting into it, because I want to help those too, because I really do want to help everybody. It's just not always possible at the same time, as you can see. All right, I hope this was helpful, and I'll hopefully see you at the summit.