You Don't Have an AI Problem, You Have an OVERTHINKING Problem

I like to think of this as the rocket versus the car. Most people are trying to build a rocket when all they need is a slightly better car. The car gets you where you need to go, but the rocket takes longer to build and it has more ways to literally blow up before you even get into it.

The prompt with Jim Carter III. Say it loud, let it land, let it stir. The prompt with Jim Carter III. Humans and tech in the same damn word. The prompt with Jim Carter III. Big ideas make the whole room turn.

Big ideas make the whole room turn. I want you to picture this with me for just a minute. I want you to imagine that you're in a room with me in a mastermind, right? We're both in this mastermind together. This is actually my mastermind. This is the one that I joined, the one that I grow in, the one that I show up for help in, the one that I raise my hand and say, I need support. And about a couple weeks prior, my mentor in this mastermind, Chris Harder, he actually texted me and he said, hey, would you actually teach your own mastermind? So I need you to think about this for a minute. I want you to put yourself in this room with me where now we're not just sitting together. I'm actually supposed to be the one learning. I'm supposed to be the one that's actually asking for help. And I'm the one upfront actually giving help. And the great thing about this is I was like, okay, so I talked, I texted Chris and I was like, yeah, I would love to do this. And there's another absolutely fantastic AI operator that's in this room with me. He asked me if I would be willing to teach with her. He asked both of us independently. We said, of course we would. Why wouldn't we want to share what we know with all of these phenomenal entrepreneurs? And again, just to set the stage of this room, every entrepreneur in this room has a half a million a year or, or greater business, some of them in the multi-seven figures and continuing to grow. So the opportunity to just showcase all of the things we know and the things that we love— incredible, right? So you're in this room with me. I go up on stage. By the way, this is like a 3-hour session. And spoiler alert, This 3 hours goes so quick, right? So in this room, I could have gone deep on literally anything, right? Workflows, automation, stack systems. But instead, I decide with my friend that we're actually gonna start with the most basic simplistic things about explaining the difference between a Google search to chatting with a large language model. To what an agent is, and then all the way to truly agentic API. It was so worth it that we started there because once everybody understood that, that one clear piece, I was able to show them what it was like to actually start to connect things to Claude, to chat, to their systems. And all of a sudden it clicked. And somebody came up to me later and they said, For the first time, it felt like AI was actually working with them instead of them working for the AI. Think about that for a minute. Of all the things that you do, of all the things that everybody who you know that is using AI doing, does it actually feel like it's adding value to us, or do we feel like we're actually working too hard for it? So like, what's going on here? And this is what I wanna talk about today. Is I'm looking at my watch, I'm looking at the time on my computer, and it's August. And I wanna, I want you to ask yourself this question: are you still running full out in the month of August? Because I hate to break it to you, but summer is basically over, right? Like, think about this. You told yourself the summer would be different. You'd have more time with the kids, your friends. You'd have longer weekends. The laptop would be closed by 6 o'clock. It's August of 2026. We're way past the halfway mark of the entire freaking year, and you're still running at the same pace, maybe even faster. And that space you created, it just got filled with more stuff, right? That, that, that's not a feeling that you're lacking. It's a feeling that you don't have the right systems in place, and it's not a character flaw. People getting time back aren't working harder. They've stopped overcomplicating what they already have. And here's the thing, you already adopted AI to get time back. If you're listening to this show, you care about AI. Now you probably have a full-time job and you're maintaining your AI setup. Like, the irony of this is absolutely brutal. So I want to tell you what I actually showed everybody in that room. It's that we have an overthinking problem, and I will be the absolute first person to stand on my chair, raise my hand the highest, and say that I am the poster child for overthinking. It has been the bane of my existence my entire professional career. But the beautiful thing, you guys, is it's also been the unlock for my entire professional career. It's given me that ability to be able to Relabel it from overthinking to thinking through things. And I'm not just justifying a problem, I'm actually identifying the fix. See, builders like me, we see a problem and we try to build everything at once. That's just what our brains are wired for, right? I have 5 apps, I have custom automations, I have prompt libraries, I have Zapier N8N flows, I have Agentic flows. I have a lot. But In a world where we're spending more time building the system than actually doing the work, we have problems. And today I want to fix those problems. I want to talk about 3 things. I want to talk about the complexity trap, the speed illusion, and just what the missing link is. Let's start with the complexity trap. The more elaborate the system, the more it needs you to maintain it. I'm gonna say that one time for the people in the back. The more elaborate the system, the more it needs you to maintain it. You don't have to be an engineer to actually understand this, but I need you to understand this because I am an engineer and I have spent my entire professional career building incredible systems. And I'll tell you what, the more complicated they are, somebody or something Has to maintain it. So if you become the maintenance crew for your own AI stack, what are we even doing? Is it because you wanna show it off? Is it because you wanna make a YouTube video and say how cool this thing is that's automated? Is it because you wanna sit around the dinner table and you wanna tell people that you've got all this AI stuff working? Spoiler alert, nobody really cares. But what you care about is not getting caught. in that complexity trap. So I need you to think about that in this world of trying to fix this overthinking problem. Number 2, the speed illusion. Okay, AI actually speeds up your tasks. Have you ever thought about that? Right? The thing that used to take you a while, it actually speeds it up. It gets it to the point where you and your AI are ready to tackle it faster than ever before. And of course, we also want it to fix and finish and check that box faster than ever before. But here's the thing that we miss. Most people like us, they just fill that saved time with more tasks. You didn't actually get time back. You just got busier faster. And this is the speed illusion. We get caught in this Wow, how much can I get done in a single day and feel incredibly accomplished? Meanwhile, we're not actually thinking about the ceiling of when is enough enough. I have found that personally I can be incredibly efficient with AI. That's, that's my e— that's, that's my MO. That's what I do. That's what I teach. That's what I do professionally. That's what people retain my time for. But if we just spend morning until night crushing our task list, well, what are we doing? We're refilling it with more junk. So I want you to think about that speed illusion. And the last one, I call it the missing link. And the reason why is because the biggest wins aren't in the most sophisticated builds. They're in the simplest connections sitting right in front of you. And this is what I really showed everybody in that room. We, we had a magic show. We showed all kinds of great things. Everybody loved it. We got amazing feedback. I was able to show some prompts. I was able to show some agents. We were able to show true agentic AI. We even had workshops and we broke off and people built incredible things in Replit. But the simplest connections sitting in right, right in front of you, those are the things that can go the furthest with large language models. AI is a mirror. It's not a magician. You bring vague ideas and you get polished vagueness is the only way that I can say that. But now I want you to shift that perspective. If you bring clear thinking, now you actually get leverage. And I want you to have more leverage. Bad thinking fast just amplifies bad output. So look, in a world where AI doesn't slow down your mistakes, it's actually scaling them. And I want to let you really think on that. The bottleneck isn't the AI, it's the clarity that you bring to it. And this is where you can start to bring that clarity right away. If you haven't yet done this, this is the one thing I want you to take away from this episode is I want you to start connecting your services like your email, your calendar, OneDrive, Dropbox, Zapier, automation tools, Stripe, whatever you've got. I want you to connect those things to your large language model and the actual thing that's going to move the needle is allowing your AI to be autonomous, to start having agency, to get you into a space where truly agentic AI is at your fingertips and you're no longer working for it. You don't need a custom app today. You don't need to write a single line of code. You just need to turn on these connectors that are already sitting inside of ChatGPT and Claude. So follow along really quick. If you're on chat, They recently updated this. You go to settings, you go to integrations, you go to plugins, and there you can start connecting things like Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, whatever those are. If you're on Claude, on pretty much every plan, you can hit the little plus sign in the lower left corner. You go to connectors, you go to manage connectors, and then you connect Google Drive, Slack, Linear, whatever you want to use. Now, when that's on there, it's going to bring these services in. You don't even have to name it every time. If you say, I wonder if I got any messages from Jim Carter, it's actually going to make sense of that. And it's going to infer that it's looking for email or Asana or Slack or anything else. And it's going to try to find it rather than you needing to actually work for it and put all of that information in. Now you can say things like, find my Q3 planning doc and pull out all the 3 biggest open questions. You don't have to give it the Q3 planning doc. You don't have to give it your biggest needs for the business that year. Even if you've already set up a project, even if you've already trained it on a lot of things, it now has the ability to go find what it needs on demand. And when you've got this, It's going to be a world of more value and give you back some of that time and space that you really need. So I want you to ask yourself, what's one task that you do every single week that's just moving info from one place to another? Or another idea, if your AI could see your actual files right now, what would you ask it for first? I like to think of this as the rocket versus the car. Most people are trying to build a rocket when all they need is a slightly better car. The car gets you where you need to go, but the rocket takes longer to build and it has more ways to literally blow up before you even get into it. So be the smart person. That is just trying to get there. A lot of the times I get hung up in this too. I think, wow, I could build this incredibly scalable, incredibly flexible, this massively cool thing, but all I really need to do is get from point A to point B and then maybe to point C and grab a coffee and then get to point D. I don't need to go into the next atmosphere. So let's start building the car first. Let's make money. Let's solve the real problem. Then with cash in hand, explore the rocket that you want to build. That's the perfect job to throw into Claude Fable and Workshop and figure out what it would be like. I want you to think about where you're spinning your wheels. Think about the tasks that should be faster now. Think about work that has nothing to do with what you're actually good at. That's where these connectors come in, to be able to do all these things, not just with you, but actually sometimes for you. The people winning with AI aren't the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack and everything that you can imagine that lights blink and do all this shit. They're the ones who asked a simpler question first. And that question is simply, what's the one thing that I keep doing manually that AI could handle if I could just see my stuff? Inside of a large language model. That's what I wanna leave you with today. And it just takes trying things. It just takes clicking things. It just takes attempting to explore what's inside of these large language models like Claude, like ChatGPT, that allow you to continue to try pushing your horizons. And if you're interested in this stuff, I have a community for people like you. It's called Control Alt Built. If you heard about me from my newsletter, if you read my newsletter, I'm so grateful for you. And this is what I produce every single week. Most people who find this community are tired of feeling behind. We all know that AI is moving fast and most just don't even know where to start or what's worth their time. And that's the itch that we scratch continually. So if you're interested in joining my community where I show up inside the Slack community, This is for people who are actually getting work out into the world, not just talking about it. We're talking real conversations, real problems, and we celebrate each other's wins. And also, this is the only place that I show up as a group coaching effort every single month. In fact, I'm recording this today and I just had my last office hours and it was so great. We workshopped all kinds of ideas. We do live demos, real feedback on what you're building. This isn't a course. I don't have courses. I don't sell courses. This is me on Google Meet with you and everybody else in this community. And I also throw in a lot of bonuses and things to just make this process the best possible. So if you wanna stop spinning on what tools I should use and start actually getting work out into the world, if you wanna automate the boring stuff, you wanna reclaim hours every week and you wanna do it without losing your voice or your edge. I teach you how to do that inside this community. You just so happen to get both of those in the same day. So if you're interested, I want you to check out jimcarter.me and click on Control All Builds. And there is a link there where you can actually check this entire community out and you can join me. You can even ask me a question. I'm in there just about every day and I love workshopping with this group. So the door is open. The link is in the show notes. Come build with me. And if this hit, I want you to share it with one person who needs it. I don't need you to share it with everybody. Just share it with one person who you know is needing to know this kind of stuff right now. And if you're still spending more time building with your AI, that's your sign. Come find me. Let's fix it and let's get it out there into the world. Big ideas make the whole room turn. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Prompt. I am your host, Jim Carter III, and I will continue to show up every single week to deliver the most updated and most impactful strategies and news in this ever-changing AI industry. The Prompt is a Cast House production, and you can learn more at casthouse.ai, and I will see you next time.