The Ultimate Guide To AI For Normal People

200 hours. That's how much time you could save this year using AI. But most people won't get there because they're using it completely wrong. Right now you're probably asking AI to do things like write me a caption or give me 10 ideas or summarize this email. Listen, AI is not a shortcut or a better way to Google. It's literally like working with a superhuman. In the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna give you the ultimate guide to AI for normal people. No jargon, no coding needed, no PhD. I'll show you exactly what tools to use, how to save 4 hours this week in just 10 minutes, and how you can get started today. Let's start with what is AI actually? Well, it's not magic. At its core, it's a prediction machine. It looks at your inputs and it predicts the most useful next word or idea or answer based on everything it's trained on. Now, mind you, it's been trained on billions and billions of things, so it's pretty well trained. Now, that's an oversimplification, but here's where it gets interesting. Modern AI isn't just predicting words. It's been trained to follow instructions, to write clearly, to break down problems, to simulate reasoning. This is why it feels like it's thinking. It behaves like it's thinking. It behaves like a writer, behaves like a strategist, a researcher, a problem solver. But under the hood, it's actually a pattern recognition machine at scale. What makes AI so powerful is that it can be trained to do pretty much anything, but it doesn't know what you want unless you tell it. This is the key. You need to tell AI what your goals are, what the outcome you want to get out of your input. It doesn't know your standards. It doesn't know your context, everything about you and the situation you're in. It doesn't know your tastes and how you like things to be delivered. So when people say, "AI gave me a bad answer," most of the time it's actually the input that gave the bad answer, and it's just guessing and giving you an average output based on what you told it. Now, you're just getting started with AI in your business and in your life. The best way to look at it is like you hired a ridiculously capable assistant. It works instantly, 24/7. It reads almost anything on the internet, right? It can produce high-level work. But it has zero context about your world. You need to give it context. You've gotta give it a chance to understand who you are and what you want. Basically, you've gotta train it just like you gotta train a new employee. So I want to get you started using AI, 'cause that's the best way to learn about AI is to actually get your hands dirty. And you're gonna start by using ChatGPT for this first task. ChatGPT can be used on your browser, it can be installed on your computer, it can be installed on your phone. It literally takes less than 60 seconds to get started. Now let me be very clear with this task. Your task is you're going to use ChatGPT as an editor and a planner, not a writer. You don't want to outsource thinking to AI, right? You want to be the creative, but you want all the grunt work to be done by AI. Okay, just like, you know, back in the old days, you ever see an old movies from the '50s or '60s where, you know, the big boss is dictating a letter to their assistant and the assistant's typing on the typewriter? This is exactly what you're trying to do with AI. I'm telling you right now, don't outsource writing and thinking to AI because you're going to end up sounding like everyone else. You do the thinking and you actually can dictate the first draft if you want to, or you can type it, and AI can make it sharper, clearer, and stronger. So in your first task right now, so you can start saving some time, you're going to start getting ChatGPT to edit and tighten your writing. This could be your emails. This could be a newsletter if you want to. This could be a message that you're sending on WhatsApp, whatever it might be. Okay. What you want to do is just give all your ideas to ChatGPT, what you want to communicate, how you want to communicate, what the outcome you're looking for with this message. And by the way, you don't have to put this in any structure. You can literally just blab, just blurt it out and ChatGPT will organize it. Then literally ask ChatGPT in the text box, Edit this for clarity and conciseness and impact. Keep my tone, uh, remove the fluff and strengthen the message. So you're using your own ideas, your own thoughts, your own style, but then ChatGPT is going to clean up for you. What a lot of people don't know is that they spend most of their time writing, editing. So when you write an email, when you write anything for business or life, you're usually spending most of the time reviewing and editing. So ChatGPT is going to take away all that grunt work and make sure you save some time. Now, if you want to take this task to the next level, you can just ask it to do things like make it more compelling, make it more engaging, make it more persuasive, improve the hook, tighten the language, and you can edit and re-edit and re-edit and improve that messaging. Now, obviously, if this is an email to a friend, it doesn't need a lot of re-editing, right? It's very informal. But let's say it's sales copy on your sales page on your website. You might ask it to do things like improve the structure, restructure this so it flows better, makes it easier to read and follow. Now what I like to do is also I like to ask ChatGPT to be critical. I literally say, what parts of this message are unclear or weak? Be critical. Now this is huge because if you don't tell ChatGPT, or I would say AI in general, to be critical, it's just going to pander to you. It's just going to try to stroke your ego, make you feel good. And obviously that's a retention tool. The people that make AI, OpenAI, ChatGPT in this example, OpenAI creates ChatGPT. They're trying to keep you on the platform. And if you feel good on the platform, you're going to stay on and continue to use it. But you could tell AI, hey, I don't want you to do that. Be critical, be matter of fact, get straight to the point. What else can you do with ChatGPT? Let's save some more time here. This is where most people really are missing out. AI is incredible at turning chaos into clarity. So I like to use ChatGPT with my weekly planning, where I literally tell ChatGPT, here are my goals for this week. I list all my goals, all the things I want to get done, the deadlines for each, and then I say, hey, create a simple focus plan with priorities and time blocks for the coming week. I do it for content planning. Let's say I'm shooting some intentional reels for Instagram and I say, hey, I'm going to be shooting these intentional reels on these topics. This is what I want to cover. Can you give me a timeline or a plan of when to shoot these intentional reels? I only have X amount of hours this week. Let me know, give me a plan of action. So sometimes it's good at filling in the gaps of things that you don't know. You know, you don't know what you don't know, and especially when you're doing something for the first time or you're not really sure how to organize something, it can give you some great ideas in organizing your work. Another task that can really save you a lot of time— now this is not something I use personally, but I have recommended to other people that have this problem, that experience a lot of overwhelm when they have a huge to-do list. They don't know how to prioritize what to do first, second, third. So you can literally give ChatGPT everything you're doing, right? And then you could say, hey, organize this into buckets or into sections. What matters? Prioritize it. What can I— what can wait? What should I ignore? What are some things I need to do immediately? Now instead of feeling completely scattered, you instantly have clarity and direction and you can get to work. This is going to save you a ton of time because a lot of us waste time on procrastination of planning. And usually before you work, you got to plan your work. And ChatGPT takes care of all of it. Now, ChatGPT is not the only game in town. You can use a lot of different AI models, a lot of different AI tools. But I just want to make sure I round off all the things that ChatGPT is great at. And then we'll move on to something like Claude that is great at other things. But one more for ChatGPT. And that's as a consultant, right? This is where things get powerful. Most people never actually do this. You can create a project inside of ChatGPT and create like your own little corner inside your ChatGPT for certain tasks. Now we're going to use this project to make decisions. It's going to be your decision-making framework. Anytime you need to make a decision, you're going to go into ChatGPT and you're going to go into this project and you're going to tell it your situation. Now before you give it your decision that needs to be made, right, you're going to just give it some context, right? You're going to tell them or tell ChatGPT your situation. You're going to explain, you know, who you are, what you do, your business, your life, your circumstances, and you're going to tell it, I want you to break down my decisions with a methodology. So one of the methodologies I like is first principles thinking. First principles thinking is basically making decisions based on the things you know, the core truths. Uh, you're going to list your assumptions, your risks, in this process, and you're going to find out what is the best decision based on logic. And this allows you to remove the emotion out of any decision. So you're basically training ChatGPT to make decisions based on first principles thinking and to make sure that it is going to assist you in any decision based on your context, your life, your business, everything it knows about you. And by the way, this gets better over time because the more you input ChatGPT— let's say, for example, you've been using it for 6 months. It's gonna know a lot about you. So its context memory is going to be much bigger. So as a first task, after you give it that first context, you could give it a situation to make a decision— whether it's a purchase, whether it's a business decision, whether it's where to go on your next holiday. You can give it a softball challenge, it's okay. And you can say, challenge this idea. What are the weaknesses? What might fail in the situation? How would you improve the situation? And it's a great kind of consultant that you can go back and forth and get some clarity on a decision. One of the things I do is I create a board of directors inside my decision framework. I basically tell ChatGPT to think like people that I may admire in different areas, whether it's Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey in media or whatever it might be. And it's basically, I can just go to it and say, hey, what would Oprah say about this situation? What decision would she make? Now, that's obviously not an exact science, but it gives you a different perspective on every decision. If you're finding this episode to be practical, helpful, something that you can use right now, then you're going to love an upcoming episode that I'm working on that I want to tell you about. It's all about how to create your own personal style and if dressing a certain way will allow you to succeed faster. I sit down with personal style expert Cassandra Sethi and we get into the weeds and figure out, hey, are we doing a disservice by dressing in a certain way or appearing in a certain way, whether it's as a service to ourselves, to our brand, to our careers? Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode once it comes out. It's coming out very soon, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. All right, let's get into why AI can really eliminate a lot of the busy work that you're doing every day to save even more time. Now I'm going to give you some rapid-fire tasks that you can do to save some major time, but before that, I just want to let you know that when you sign up for ChatGPT, there's a free version and there's the paid version. You can start with the free, but I highly recommend the paid version, which is I think $20 or $25 a month. It's pretty, pretty good because you get unlimited use of ChatGPT, you get use of all the latest models. I think it's one of the best bargains in town, okay? It's just a no-brainer in my opinion as a business expense in your line items of expenses because it could be used in so many ways to save you time and money. And by the way, this goes for any AI model. I also pay a subscription for Claude, because it's well worth that subscription. I get so much out of it. So what are some of the tasks you can do right now quickly so that you can save some time right now, whether you're using ChatGPT or Claude? And we're going to get into Claude in a moment. But here it goes. Email replies, right? Copy paste the email and just— you could just literally dictate and tell ChatGPT or whatever AI you're using, hey, this is my reply. This is what I want to say. Clean it up, make it polite, make it short, make it clear. Summaries. Oh man, I was just going through some contracts because we're signing a new lease for our new studio office that we're moving into very soon here in Sydney. And these leases are, you know, hundreds of pages. So I gotta read hundreds of pages while I upload it to AI and say, hey, could you summarize this? Is there any things I need to look out for? Where are some of the takeaways? What are some things I need to adjust in this lease? What are some things I gotta negotiate? Is a time saver when it comes to summarization. Another task, turn existing content into different types of content. So say for example, you have a really popular LinkedIn post. Well, why just let it be a LinkedIn post? If that idea resonated with people, ask ChatGPT to create a short reel out of it so that you can shoot that and put it on Instagram. Okay, so you literally can copy and paste the post, or you can just give a link to the post, and it will create a script for you to shoot. How much time would it take you to do that on your own? Okay, this is the magic of AI. All right, let's talk about Claude as an AI model versus ChatGPT. ChatGPT is very good, is very powerful, but I say it's more of a generalist. Claude is actually amazing, like very, very, very, very good at writing, at human tone, at editing, and coding. If you ever want to code anything, Even though you don't know how to write a line of code, it can do it for you using just English language. You could tell it to do what you want to do in English. I use Cloud Code in building a fully fledged app. I actually did a full episode on is it possible to build a commercial viable app that I could sell in just 7 days using AI? And if you want to check out that episode, make sure you go to our website or go to YouTube and check it out. Uh, just go to 100mba.net. And you can find that episode. It's a recent episode, maybe about a week or two ago. Now, how would I get started with Claude? Well, actually, I would do the same things I recommended for you to use in ChatGPT with Claude, and you can see for yourself how it differs, okay? How it actually creates different outputs, and you see which flavor you like better. But one task that I highly recommend you use Claude for versus ChatGPT is fixing anything on your website or anything technical. You don't need to be a developer. You don't need to be technical at all because Claude's got a tool called Claude Cowork. And basically it's a desktop app that basically can just jump onto your computer and do what you want it to do. Now, listen, you might think, wow, this is crazy. It's going to take over my computer. Is that a security risk? It's actually pretty secure because every step of the way it will ask for permission. Can I use this browser? Can I use this website on this browser? Right? And you say yes, yes, yes. And it'll only use, uh, or be able to do things on that site specifically. So for example, if there's something that is just not right on your website, like for example, you don't know how to take a picture that's on your website and make sure it's centered. If for some reason, no matter what you do, it doesn't work. And I've been there a million times and I've tinkered for hours on my website. Just give, you know, Claude, uh, Cowork access to that website and it will go ahead and edit it for you. It'll go in and it knows exactly what to do because it has all the information in the world and it's like a supercomputer that goes ahead and makes those edits and fixes any problems. Once you do that, fix any problems in your website, you start to think, well, this is possible. Well, it can create pages for you. It can create opt-in, you know, forms. It can, uh, you know, help you with copy on the page. There's so much it can do once you start playing with it. If you wanna get really fancy, you can do what we did and create a calculator on your sales page. If you go on our website, 100mba.net, and just go to our program, the 100 MBA program where we sell our program, you'll see on the bottom of the page a calculator where customers can calculate how much money they can make per customer if they charge X amount of dollars, so they can see the return on investment of that program. So if you wanna create an ROI calculator for your products and services, go ahead and do that. And Claude can do it for you simply without you needing to code or anything. This is just an incredible tool that allows you to have basically a senior developer just plop on your desk and take over your desktop. You want to create a new project, new product, it could create a whole website for you. Claude is amazing at development. Now, if you want to use Claude Cowork and do all this fancy stuff, yes, you could try for free, but I highly recommend you have a Claude subscription because you're going to run out of credits very quickly and you won't be able really do a lot in a short period of time. Again, it's $20 a month. It's a great deal for what it could do. So let's sum up how much time we could save on just what we learned today and what you can implement this week. You could save at least an hour or two on research. You can save another 2 hours on editing and writing, another hour on admin and busywork. You can save another few hours on decision-making. So we're well over 4 hours. But this only works when you stop thinking, how do I use AI to do 1, 2, 3? No, start thinking, what would I do if I had a team of researchers, writers, editors, marketers, consultants, developers, engineers? What could I do if I had a team of all these people? And assign those actual roles to AI to do that work. I'm telling you right now, AI is going to make you a superhuman because of everything it can do for you. It removes friction and makes things just easier. And the easier things are, the more time you save, the more time you will have in being innovative and creating great products and services and being creative with your work. You can start actually tapping into your zone of genius without having to be bogged down with all this admin. If you're watching this episode on YouTube, let me know in the comments below if this episode was helpful. What was your favorite tip? How are you going to use AI immediately? If you are listening to this podcast, then you can always send me a message on Instagram. I'm on Instagram @omarzenhom. Just go ahead and DM me and I'll be happy to go back and forth with you. I want to learn what you are learning from our episodes so that I can continue to get better and better and provide better episodes so that you can really maximize your time with me on the podcast. Now, if you found today's episode helpful and you want to continue to learn, there's an episode that we published recently called The growth rate most businesses should actually aim for. What percentage of growth should you actually shoot for every single month or quarter? Having a specific number is important, and there's a real number that I give you so that you don't have to guess. That episode will give you a lot of direction. It's called The Growth Rate Most Businesses Should Aim For. Go ahead and check it out. I'll see you in the next one. But until then, remember, use everything at your disposal, including AI, to improve your chances of success, because in business you only need to be right once. And once that business runs and does what it's supposed to do, it's going to change your life. I'll see you on the next episode.