I just realized something today, Jake's first classroom lesson isn't about Claude Code. It's a history lesson. Titled "A 2,000-Year Overnight Success." The argument: AI is not 70 years old. https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/classroom/d7ae60cf?md=147b0e486c964ba78a70cdc1d2d40c5d I don't need to rehash it here; if you skipped it, go back to read it. It was the first weekend of April, I had found Jake's videos the week before, then discovered Skool and dove into the classroom. I made a commitment to myself to read each page, not throw them into NotebookLM for the summary. To my disappointment, I see a super long history lesson. I sink into my chair. Eventually, I get to the end. AlphaGo. I had never heard of AlphaGo before; somehow, that story had slipped past me. I queued up YouTube on my TV and sat down for a Saturday evening documentary. Fascinating! AlphaZero started tabula rasa. Blank slate, no domain-specific human knowledge. Just the rules and play against yourself. In four hours, it rediscovered centuries of chess openings, endgames, and positional theory - then kept going past what humans ever found. Kasparov called it "like discovering the secret notebooks of some great player from the past." Those moves weren't invented. They were already in the game. The truth was latent in the mathematical structure of chess. AlphaZero excavated it. That's the archaeologist move - applied to a machine. It didn't study the tradition. It played to the pattern. Jake's throughline: "The mistake is thinking these layers replace each other. They don't. They stack." In the classroom, he could have started with how to prompt or an explanation of what a harness is. Instead, he started with the source of the whole thing. Because you can't build conviction on a trend. A pattern that's held for two thousand years isn't a trend. That's proof. I've worked with a family lumber business. 125 years old. Founded 1900, delivering coal by horse and buggy. Today, it's digital marketing, performance ads, algorithms, and closed-loop lead tracking. Every generation rebuilt what the company looked like. But the fourth-generation president still says what his father said: "Young man, we're not in the lumber business. We're in the shelter business." The tools stacked. The belief didn't.

It's easy to become overwhelmed by all of the information in the videos and in the community. Every day, I read words and acronyms that I do not understand and watch people build apps that are just crazy brilliant. One of the things that I started doing early on is taking something I didn't understand and feeding it to ChatGPT to explain. Drop in a video and ask, "Tell me the basics." or "Explain this as if I were in 9th grade." Take a discussion here in the community and copy/paste then ask questions. You can do that with someone's app/repo, too. Ask, "What does this do?" or "What problem does this solve?" The responses become another classroom. Ask until your brain is full. Ask until you are weary - because the next day those questions and answers become a foundation. Soon, you'll find yourself asking deeper questions, like: "What are the most important files in this repo and what do they do?" "How does the structure support the desired results?" "How does data move through this system?" and then that becomes ... "What parts of this repo fit my project?" "How could I adapt this repo to do X?" Don’t let the acronyms, tools, and tech language intimidate you. Everyone starts at the beginning. When you see people with 20 years of IT experience or someone launching a product that earns money right away, that’s okay. Celebrate it. Learn from them. But don’t let their progress distract you from your own opportunity to build, create, and make your mark in the AI world. You belong here, too. Every day brings something new to learn and a new idea to explore. I keep finding myself amazed by what is possible. The more I learn, the wider my vision gets. Only now, I’m not just watching anymore — I’m building, creating and imagining what I can do next. You will get there too.