After the first exercise at setting up folders, I began the next day to put it to work. I have two websites that I built with Manus and everything was great, until it wasn't - and I had no reasonable method to fix bugs. After my Brevo account got totally jacked up and my lists went to the netherworld, that was the last straw. I started to create files for a new site that I am going to use on the WordPress platform. I finished it at one session. The next day I decided to start with the second site and the lightbulb went on! I can make a set of skills for this! A whole new vista opened up. And while I am here. I SWORE I'd NEVER try Skool again. Ever! There was little to no value in anything I tried. Wasted money. But God has a sense of humor. This is the very first time that I have ever experienced a true community and that has meant the world to someone who lives very isolated. Thanks to all of you who helped me so selflessly! This is the Way. 😉

@Jake Van Clief is the reason I was inspired to make this video. The reason I was able to have Claude create the script in my voice. The reason I was able to create an animation from that script with my branding palette. It’s amazing to see every day here what’s being made possible and so much of it is because of the knowledge being shared by everyone. Thank you Jake! https://youtube.com/shorts/9KSaHCcet8c?si=pymly_RgV9OHETag

Today was spent in flow. Moving through one chat but multiple folders and sub projects within the project. If anyone is lost let me know I was lost for the first few days and know I am grasping more everyday. But today was my first day with ICM and the workflow is amazing. I remember waiting for 30 seconds to sometimes minutes. Image writing three prompts in one chat instructions for a feature update, logic for a different feature and a revision and it working on all three things with a hang time of 46 seconds. Something Cowork (even in projects would struggle with). Thanks Jake and team and those who help with this morning.

Every major technology came with a confident prediction that it would ruin us. We innovated our way around every single one. I think back to The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, and that's the part that sticks with me. His argument is simple. Look back at any big leap, the railways, electricity, the factory, the car; and you'll find serious people warning it would wreck health, wreck jobs, wreck society. The warnings were genuine. They were also wrong, almost every time, because human ingenuity kept doing the thing it always does: it innovated the disaster out of existence before the disaster arrived. The predicted catastrophe assumes everyone stands still and lets it happen. People never do. Now I read my feed about AI. Same shape. Same certainty that this time the sky really is falling, that this is the one technology we won't adapt to. I'm not saying there's nothing to be careful about. There always is. What I'm saying is that the doom story is not new, and the track record of that story is terrible. The optimistic case isn't blind hope. It's just history. Every time we've handed ourselves a more powerful tool, we've also figured out how to live with it. I think AI is the next entry on that list, not the exception to it. https://youtube.com/shorts/kECtKHQYjgI?si=7AbSfzOdr-2BTgTg

Quick note for those of you in here just starting out and chasing your first clients: it ain't all roses and rainbows on the other side. Most of what gets posted in this community are the wins. Tonight you get one of the harder nights. Take it however you take it. Last night a client sent me a "you didn't deliver" email at 11pm. Hard read. The kind where your stomach drops and you start rereading every contract clause you signed three months ago. Spent the next 9 hours running an audit of every deliverable across two Fractional CMO contracts and a brand + website project. By 2am I had numbers on it. They paid us a bit under $20K combined. The audit showed I'd scoped out closer to $60K of work for that price. That number is the painful one. Four mistakes got me here. Maybe one of them is sitting in your shop too. ------------------------------------ 1. I ignored the human flags. ------------------------------------ (EDIT: My team encouraged me to remove details from this first point out of an extreme abundance of caution. I don't think I'm whitewashing this point, but if you disagree, letm know in the comments. PS. Update incoming.) Early on I saw how this person treated people who weren't in the room. How they talked about the people closest to them. How they described their own team when those folks couldn't hear it. That's a personality profile in a handful of data points. I noted it. Then I told myself "everyone has their style" and kept building. And I still think there are real human reasons they operate this way. Doesn't make it right. Just explains it, instead of a throwaway "they're a narcissist." I've dealt with actual narcissists. This person doesn't fit the box. Regardless, bad call. The way someone treats the people closest to them is the way they'll eventually treat you. The clock just hadn't started. ------------------------------------ 2. I handed my thinking to AI. ------------------------------------ I let AI draft proposals without putting the same eyes on them I would've put on a 2019 proposal. Three different proposals from the same business in the same month, with three different ways of describing the same deliverable. Vague names. Duplicate items. One column literally called "SEO Content Alignment" that nobody on my team could actually explain to a client.