The Only Skill You Need to Succeed in the AI Era

People are going to be replaced by AI way faster than they think, because AI isn't just getting quicker. It's mastering almost every skill that humans rely on. I've spent the last five years building AI companies, training teams, and helping founders redesign their workflows around AI. And I can tell you with 100% certainty, the people who will survive and win are not the most skilled at AI. They're the ones who think about AI in a completely different way. So I'm going to share with you the ultimate only trait you need to be successful in the AI era. But to do that, there are a few mindset shifts you need to master first, starting with using AI as a trainer. Most people think AI is going to make them dumb. They think if AI thinks for them, their mind weakens. It's almost like saying a calculator makes you worse at math. It just allows you to do more. The truth is, if AI can strengthen your thinking, you will get sharper and more dangerous. I am a better entrepreneur times 100 because of AI. For example, I've been traveling the world with my kids, and they're homeschooling. The school said no using AI to do their work. I don't want them to use AI to do their homework. I want them to use AI to learn. So what I did is I sat down with them and I created a system prompt that's specific to each kid. It takes the thing that they're interested in, soccer by who they want to learn from. Ronaldo. And it teaches them physics and math and English through that lens. Why is that not a good idea? And then when they're doing the test 100%, 100%, 1%, 10. Did that make them dumb or it taught them to learn faster? So you have to use AI as a helper, not a crutch. Now, once you start using AI to level up, you will start noticing something new. Some of the ideas it presents you, some of the content, some of the decisions it suggested, they just feel better, and you can't explain why. Which leads us to our next mindset shift. Taste. Taste is essentially your ability to spot excellence instantly. And the only way your taste can grow, your ability to find it is through excellence in, because then you can find the excellence out, which means you have to get exposure. It's kind of like Rick Rubin, the music producer. He's worked with like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga, Adele. When he hears music, he can't tell you what is going to be great. He can just tell you when he hears it. I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music. You must know something. Well, I know what I like and what I don't like. That is taste. Excellence isn't just random. It's a pattern your brain learns to recognize. And your prompts to get AI to do things for you can only improve once your taste improves. So here's how you can build a stronger taste for yourself. The first thing, immerse yourself in excellence every day. The truth is, if your friends aren't on the journey of trying to be the best at something, it's going to be hard for you to find great stuff. If your co workers aren't always trying to find the best way to do the work, they it's gonna be hard to be exposed to great work. My philosophy is proximity is power. If you wanna improve your taste, go get around people creating excellent work. Second is you have to study the masters in your field. Every discipline has master. I hire the best coaches to teach me things because I believe it's better to pay for the blueprints, pay to be exposed to mastery because when I'm in it, that energy, it almost like integrates into my beingness. And the best part is that even if you can't pay for a great coach, the they're all out there and they're creating content like this. So for example, if you're a startup and you want to learn how to pitch your startup better, go on YouTube and you will find these pitch competitions. You can search for all the top winners. And third, use social media as a masterclass, not entertainment. I can't tell you how many people just waste their time doom scrolling feeding their brain brain rot when they could be using their feed to feed their mind. Follow people that are 10 steps ahead of you. Find the people that are creating content. If you're a chef, trust me, the chef creators are out there. If you're an entrepreneur, they're out there. If you're a musician, they're out there. Like go use your feed and make sure it feeds you excellence by inspiring you to create great work. And finally, when you see something great, ask yourself why does this work? Because it'll get your brain to analyze things and try to find the patterns. Like I said earlier, you want to teach your brain to identify the patterns of greatness. And the more you can be exposed to it, the easier it's going to get. Most people just consume and leave it at that. It's like reading a book. I want you to consume and ask the question that's like Studying a book. And there's a difference. Now if you're a business owner and you're thinking, but Dan, I barely have enough time to run my company. How am I supposed to learn all this AI stuff? This is exactly why I built my AI implementation playbook. It's a detailed step by step guide that you can hand to every department head in your business so that they can get 10 times more using AI workflows. You get your time back while your team gets more efficient. So if you want to copy, just DM me AI business on Instagram or click the link link below and I'll send you a copy for free now. Developing taste helps you know what's great today. But if you want to be successful in the AI era, you need to master your ability to see what will matter in the future. Which brings us to our next point. Vision. Vision is the ability to see a future that doesn't exist yet, but should. And most people don't spend enough time in the future. It's our job to actually know where the world's going to see 18 months in the future to look around corners for our customers. And AI gives you the space to think even bigger. The other day I'm mountain biking with my friends. As I'm coming down, I have an idea about robotics and I think about how could I enter and invest and how big of a market could this be in the future? So I open up my phone, load up Grok. It's got this version called Heavy. It's wild to watch it literally execute 100 AIs at once. Doing research for you and coming back. So I craft the prompt, asking it for research and history examples and what could it mean and how many units and what would it be priced at and how much money that that whole market could be over the next five to 10 years. And it went off for 27 minutes and came back and gave me an answer. That answer allowed me to enter in as an investor in the robotics space with a ton of confidence backed by data. It gave me the data, but I had to have a vision for action that's still on me. So this is how you build your vision muscle. First off, you have to block out time to actually do deep thinking. Every week you should have a block time called thinking time. And in that time you literally force yourself to about the future. Use that space to actually do research. Talk to the AI. Consider it a research co pilot, a buddy. Most people don't get any thoughtful outputs because they don't ask it any thoughtful Questions. You know, I was hanging out, my buddy Nick, he has a sign company and I was like, if you're not looking into robotics, you should. He's like what? Why would I want to look into robots? I have a sign company. Ask AI. Next thing you know he's going to friggin Brazil to the number one robotics event for sign company. If you don't use it to help it craft your vision, you can't build that muscle. And that's why you have to create time to actually think about it. Number two is we want to study breakouts outside of our industry. If you already know what you know and everybody else knows what you know, then where's the innovation? Where's the breakthroughs? When you look at the examples like Henry Ford learning the whole assembly system by watching the meat packers in Chicago and he applied it to cars. That's where the innovation came from. When I look at my life, I'm taking inspiration from other industries, I'm taking stuff from media and applying it to AI. I'm looking at music producers and saying what can they teach me about creating software? Do you see how like crazy of a connection yet it is all connected. You're not going to find the innovation in the cross section if you're not out there studying them. And last, you have to use AI to pressure test your assumption and ideas. One of my favorite use cases is to put the audio version where I can talk to it, that little blue bubble in ChatGPT and I'll go for a run and I'll talk to it while I'm running and then what I do is I use it to help me project scenarios. I'll say what if this, what if I chose to do this? What if I sold this company? What if I decided to do this? What if I transferred people around? And the more you talk to it, the more you'll hear it reply back to you. It'll teach you how to think about vision and then you can even say, hey, I feel like I think too small. Force me to think bigger and it'll ask you questions that'll get you to think bigger. Your AI can be your partner in learning how to think with more vision. Do you know Chad GPT, you can actually ask it to send you a daily summary on anything. And I haven't analyzed the previous day, top trending news or things I need to know about as an AI investor. And then when I go to the gym I hit the play button so it reads it to me every day. AI is keeping me Fresh with new ideas so I can think about the vision and how those things can be connected. If you do this, you'll allow yourself to look way out into the future, rather than staying stuck in your today. Being able to visualize the future, it is a superpower. But even the best ideas die if people don't want to help you execute them. See, there's a shift that will transform you from an individual with just ideas into someone who people trust to implement them. Which takes us to our fourth mindset shift. Care. AI can mimic intelligence. It does that really well, but it can't mimic genuine care. Care is people feeling that you want to see them win, not just yourself. You can't solve real problems if you can't see through their eyes. And the best entrepreneurs can do that. AI can't do that. And the coolest part is the easiest way to show care to somebody else is to make other people's needs your own. See, most people don't understand the most valuable companies in the world. Nvidia has created 28,000 millionaires. Microsoft 12,000 millionaires. Jeff Bezos only owns 8 to 9% of Amazon. The company's worth $2.24 trillion, which means that 91, 92% of the money ever made by Amazon made other people rich. So if you truly want to be successful in this new AI era, then you caring for other people will make you different. Because everybody can use the AI tools, but you're going to use the AI tools. Plus you're going to show up and make it about that. In a world of infinite outputs, care is the ultimate input. Here's how you strengthen your care as a leader. First off, get to know your people. Get to know your clients, get to know your community. You know, every time I interview somebody, I always ask them the same questions. In five years, you're waking up, you're living your dream life. What does it look like? If I can understand their dreams and goals, then I can figure out how to align ours as a company to theirs. And then they wake up every day pushing themselves forward. I don't ever have to remind them. Be specific. I want to ask them about their family, their personal life, their desires. When they say they want to buy a dream home, I want to know where and what it looks like. The second thing is always ask for feedback by trusted people. My rule is I can't get better if I don't know ways to get better. I can't give feedback if I don't ask for feedback first. So if you have Something you want to say to somebody to help them out first, ask them to give you feedback and that actually shows them that you care about. The ultimate form of flattery to somebody is to actually ask them their opinion. If they feel like you care, they'll care about you. If they feel like you don't care, they won't care. And that's something AI cannot do. And last is celebrate them. I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs or leaders out there that are like, well, if I celebrate, then maybe they'll take their foot off the gas. It's like, what are we talking about? Celebrate the milestones, celebrate the success. My big thing is praise in public. And if you got to criticize, do that in private. Use the tool Slack. Shout them out. If they win really big, maybe share with your whole social media account. Just today, Sam, who's my creative director, posted a banger video on his page and I took it and I shared it to my audience and I said, follow Sam. I want people to see what excellence looks like and I want him to know I appreciate that stuff. And if that doesn't convince you to care more, let me just share one simple thing. The whole point of business is to develop people. If you wake up every day to be rich, guess what? You'll go through a lot of people because you'll have to keep going through people that are willing to wake up for a little bit and put up with your bullshit. But if you actually wake up and make it about them, they will wake up to make it about the business. And if you own the business, that's how everybody wins. So don't forget, we build the people first and the people build the business. Developing all these mindset shifts is great, but there's really only one trait that matters more. To be defensible against AI Be the director, not the doer. Most people treat AI like a faster pair of hands. It's kind of like buying a self driving car and then reaching over and still putting your hand on the steering wheel. It's like, let it do the work. Winners treat AI like a team. They direct. A few months ago I had a leadership training and at the end of it, I was very clear with my whole team. Every person in the company had weeks to demonstrate to me how they could get AI to do 92% of their work. And trust me, that one confused people, scared people, and really worried people. But I needed them to hear it. There's no future where AI can't do your work. So if you can't Figure out where it can support you at 92% and you become the director and it's the doer. Then you'll always be behind where we need to be as a team. AI will always be consistently more productive doing. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't take vacations, it doesn't complain, it doesn't call in sick. Learn to set up the automations, be the director, not the doer. So here's how you become the best director in your work. First off is we use the 10, 80, 10 rule. At the end of the day, the first 10 is 10% ideation. I want to sit down with my team, maybe my mentor. I want to collaborate, I want to ideate. The other 80% is the doing. That is where AI can take whatever you gave it as an input and turn it into almost completed work. That last 10% is that taste we developed earlier. It's where you come in and you give it that final integration into the business. Right? It's Elon Musk going on stage and presenting the products they built. But the AI did all the execution. Next, we have to switch from push prompting to pull prompting. See, most people get out of AI essentially a mirror of what they ask for. Innovation can't happen if you're kind of guiding it based on your questions where you want to go. So instead of telling AI how to do it, tell it what you need and have it ask you the question so that it can do it for you. AI has more information, more context, more wisdom than you'll ever be able to even potentially remember in your brain. So you gotta actually have it guide you to the best outcome. Kind of like fill in the blanks. See, most people do all the work themselves and then go to AI to have it fill in the blanks. I'd much rather have AI do all the works and then I come in and I fill in the blanks. And last, you have to build AI first workflows. Pretty much everything in your life is a workflow. It goes from raw materials to finished goods, from idea to some kind of output. And if you can figure out within there where you have bottlenecks and you can learn the AI tools to automate that and design it, that is the future of being a director in this AI era. You need to adopt that mindset. AI can teach you how to set up everything. When I was working with my CFO to automate all of our financials, he at first said, well, I can't do it because I don't know how to do it and I was like, write the code to integrate the systems. And it wrote the code. Oftentimes people are just pretending not to know that AI can literally write code for you to get anything done. By doing these three things, it'll allow you to be the director, not the doer, and be successful in this new AI era. When you make this shift, AI stops overpowering you and starts empowering you. That's how you stay ahead. All that being said, your biggest edge in the AI era isn't speed or tools. The people that are like nerdy on like, what model should I use and what tools should I use, they're missing the whole point. It's actually becoming the kind of person who thinks clearly, leads boldly and cares deeply the humanity of it. People forget it's human being, not human doing. AI is here to amplify you, not replace you. But you got to learn how you use it to still accomplish things in your world, to add value to your customers, to your team, but if anything, give you the time back to be more you. So think about it for yourself. What's the one area that you've used AI in your life to get more time back so that you had that time to amplify who you are? Write it below in the comments so you can inspire other people that watch this to consider different things, that you're using AI to implement what I just shared so that you can become more. And remember, if you want access to my own AI implementation playbook, just DM me the words AI Business on my Instagram or click the link below in the description. Now, if you want to learn how to get insanely rich with AI in just 20 minutes, click here and I'll see you on the other side.