During the last AI Advantage event, Dean provided us with 4 words that truly stood out to me and "prompted" me to begin a new journey. Yes, the pun was intentional! The prompt went like this: This was in Claude Opus 4.7, but will work with any LLM "Over the next several weeks, you and I will get to know each other on the following levers. You are open to ask me questions, push back, and get into my mind. Activate - Get to know me deeply and what is important to me Accelerate - Get to know how I think and work Augment - You will create along side of me Automate - I want you to be my number 1 assistant." Now this looks simple enough, but what took place then was a great conversation with myself and the LLM. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I had my number 1 assistant who is my second brain, my confident, my devil's advocate, and my Spock to my Captain Kirk, it even throws in a sly comment from Bones once in a while for you Star Trek fans out there. Regardless of any personas you decide to make use of, I highly recommend you begin training your preferred LLM on how you think, how you reason, what is important to you and your goals. It is amazing how much better and more clearly I am able to think through problems and to have my LLM Business Partner ensure that I am thinking clearly and always brings me back to my center and goals. One more thing, now that we have completed a few projects together, I asked my business partner LLM how we can move this into an agent that can make use of any LLM at any time, and I now have a set of resources I can load into ANY LLM and make use of each LLM based on what they do best. I can even get my multiple LLM's to review each other's work and let me know where we all agree and where we disagree which in and of itself has been AMAZING. Happy Prompting, or I guess the new word is Contexting!

There's a particular kind of productive-feeling procrastination that the AI era has made very easy to fall into. It involves tabs. Usually many tabs. Reviews, comparisons, Reddit threads, YouTube walkthroughs, LinkedIn posts from people using tools you've never heard of. "Is this better than what I'm using? What is everyone else using? Am I falling behind?" An hour passes. No work has been done. But it feels like work, because you're learning about AI. The gap between what you're currently doing and what's theoretically possible feels like a problem you need to solve before you can get back to the actual work. This is one of the most underacknowledged time costs in AI adoption right now, not the failure to use AI, but the consumption of working hours by the pursuit of better AI. ------------- Context ------------- The pace of AI development creates a genuine psychological pressure. New tools are released constantly. Capabilities improve on timescales of months, not years. The thing that was cutting-edge in January can feel ordinary by April. For anyone paying attention, there's a persistent sense that the current setup might be suboptimal, that somewhere out there is a tool or a workflow that would produce meaningfully better results, if only you could identify it. That sense isn't entirely wrong. The tools are genuinely improving. New options really do appear regularly. Some of them are meaningfully better than what came before. But the question worth examining is what the search for those tools is actually costing. Every hour spent researching, evaluating, and switching tools is an hour not spent doing the work that makes a business run. And the time cost of staying current with the AI tool landscape has grown dramatically alongside the number of options available. A straightforward audit shows what this costs at scale. If someone spends ninety minutes per week researching AI tools, reading about new capabilities, watching demos, and evaluating potential switches, that's about 75 hours per year, nearly two full work weeks. Two weeks invested in understanding what's possible. Two weeks not spent executing.