Intern saves the business on his first day with a brilliant idea

Everybody on social media is laughing about this post:

You might laugh...

But so many businesses leave obvious money-making opportunities on the table.

My new client is a business coach... and when he gets a new coaching client, he tells them to list all their "revenue generating activities".

He basically says, "what do you do that makes you the most money?"

For some people, that's sending cold emails. For some people, that's going to networking events. And for some people, that's making content.

Once people list their revenue generating activities, my client says "do more of that stuff."

This advice seems obvious... but a lot of people don't figure it out until they start paying multiple thousands of dollars a month for business coaching.

You can take that advice for free right now. Take a moment and list everything you do that makes you money.

For most coaching business, that's making more content. (Or better content.)

The more content you make, the more people you bring in the door, the more you grow your personal brand... and the more sales you bring in.

So how can you find 2 extra hours per week to make content?

Why AI research is about to hit a brick wall

The futurist Eliezer Yudkowsky says that AI is gonna kill us. According to him, humanity has maybe 3 or 4 years left, if we're lucky.

That's one end of the AI opinion spectrum. On the other end are 2 of my tech startupy friends who are deep in the weeds in AI. They've worked their butts off to build tech products using AI, then realized that AI isn't actually good enough to do what they wanted it to do. They both say it's a dead end.

I'm closer to my 2 tech startup friends. I've started using AI for some stuff, including helping me with sales outreach and studying Turkish. But I'm not ready to let AI run my whole business.

For example, when I write emails for my clients, AI can give me a decent first draft if I prompt it correctly. But then I have to do a whole lot of editing. It saves me time, but I think the end product is more or less the same.

(People can tell when an email is just hot off the oven from ChatGPT... and it hurts your brand when you send an email full of em dashes and clichés. At the very least, you have to tweak stuff.)

AI, in its present state, is going to change the world — but not as much as everybody thinks.

I also don't think AI is going to get much better in the next few years. Here's why.

There's a difference between incremental improvement and revolutionary breakthrough. Incremental improvement is when you make something slightly better than what already exists. Revolutionary breakthrough is when you make a completely new thing.

Think about the difference between the invention of the Toyota Prius and the invention of the automobile. Yes, Priuses get good gas mileage, but they don't change that much. Whereas when the car was invented, it changed the whole way that cities are designed.

Revolutionary breakthroughs are pretty rare. There's been a revolutionary breakthrough in AI research about once every decade. ChatGPT was the most recent one.

The people at Google and OpenAI will continue to incrementally improve their AI models. Maybe the AI will get slightly better at the stuff it's already doing — like writing lyrics for fake Bon Jovi songs or searching the internet for the best chocolate chip cookie recipes. 

But Google and OpenAI aren't really working on making revolutionary changes. (Big companies usually aren't good at revolutionary change.) So AI will get a little bit better every year, but it won't get a lot better for another decade or so.

By the time our grandkids are in college, sure, AI will have completely changed the world. But for now, I suspect it isn't going to change much!

Another cat story

A few weeks ago I went to a park. Lots of cats live in this park.

I brought a chicken wrap with me. It was my lunch, but the cats didn't know that. 3 of them were next to me before I had my first bite. 

I've been back to this park a few times since. Once I sat for an hour and read, and one of my new friends — a small black cat with a white belly — sat in my lap the whole time.

Yesterday I went back. My riend allowed me to pet him right away, and started sitting next to me. 

Then I heard meowing behind me. 2 more cats were strutting towards me — one of them was pitch black, and another was orange and grey. 

They were jealous. They wanted me to pet them, too.

Soon, all 3 of them were competing for my attention!

It sounds silly, but this is exactly how building an audience works.

You have your "bait" — your lead magnet — to get people in the door. In my case, that was a chicken wrap.

The more your audience sees you, the more they like and trust you, and the more comfortable they get letting you into their lives — and buying stuff from you.

Petting cats is about trust. Lots of people pet cats the wrong way: they're too aggressive, and it's scary. Cats don't really want you petting them until you prove you're not going to hurt them by accident.

Selling coaching and info products is about trust, too. When people buy a course, they have no idea what's in it. (If they did, they wouldn't need to buy it!)

They're afraid of dropping thousands of dollars on something that won't help them at all.

The more you show them that you actually know what you're talking about, the more you ease their fears.

So get people in the door, send them good content — and sales will roll in.

-Theo