This is getting weird.

This week I got more done than during the past month combined.

No joke. The GPT-family changed it all for me. And I’ve done my fair share of exaggerating results before for some of that dramatic effect – but this is the real deal.

I’ve used these little robots both in my 9-5 as an academic and for building online far faster than before.

Just an example, I created this in less than one hour: https://simohosio.com/focusfactors/. Now, depending when you’re reading this email, it might be in a different shape, of course. Now, as I’m typing this on Saturday March 18, 2023, it’s still completely unpolished. Graphs are not there, the text is mostly directly from GPT4, etc. But this is the stub I’ve been procrastinating on for about 4 months for now.

Makes. No. Sense.

60 daily minutes of laser-focus (he, topic of the seminar), working together with GPT4 and you can build pretty much whatever you want. I mean, it’s not limited to random landing pages online, you can build mobile applications, services, anything with it!

It. Is. Insane.

But you wouldn’t know if you’re not ready to try.

Many aren’t.

Let me make a simple comparison:

• Person A is willing to invest $9.99 a month for Netflix, $19.99 a month for sports channels, and 2 hours of time daily to watch these things, learning nothing.
• Person B invests $20.00 for GPT4 and 1 hour per day to build toward his dreams, one day at a time.

Honestly, which one do you think will come on top?

And no! This is not to criticise anyone watching Netflix. I watch it too. Heck, we even TRY to watch it every night, little by little, with kids to spend time together. It can be educative, fun and just so much fun to try to understand more and more complicated movies with kids. Or just to have a laugh together.

But even so, investing in being on top of the curve is the smart thing to do. What do you do when you decide to build a tree house? You buy the hammer. You buy the nails. You buy the saw.

It’s the same online. If having a personal Large Language Model makes it possible to build something you’d normally either build very slow or not at all – why not buy it?

I find it almost incomprehensible that so many are still dwelling in the mindset that everything online should be free. The big shift in thinking for me was when I realised these are investments to myself and tools that are, unfortunately for some, necessities in the future.

Here’s How to Use Large Language Models for Your Everyday Life and Work

So let’s break this down. Welcome to the future:

Step 1: Identify your Needs

Think about the tasks you do manually daily. These are in most cases such as drafting emails, writing reports, creating meeting agendas or just brainstorming ideas for different projects.

At this point – and especially if you have limited experience of these language models – you might be thinking there’s no way they can help me!

But I dare you, give them a chance!

Step 2: Explore Available Tools

As usual, they only talk about ChatGPT. There’s room for one winner only in the media. But in reality, there are already hundreds of AI-powered tools out there for you to explore!

Just Google “top ai tools for <insert your occupation or niche here> and, honestly, try the free trials! Most of them offer a test drive for a few days. You lose nothing. And luckily the email laws are also so strict these days that everyone obeys that “unsubscribe” click too.

So use the opportunity to learn and educate yourself!

Step 3: Try Integrating the Tool to Your Workflow

Sometimes stuff just doesn’t click.

I’ve toyed around with probably 50-60 different AI tools during the past year, and right now I’m using only maybe 6.

The tools weren’t bad. It’s just that, well, as humans, we have preferences! And some tools integrate better with our existing lifestyles and workflows. The availability of a mobile app or even if the design works well on mobile screens are big things too!

So… there’s no shortcut here, you just have to try if it works in your work.

Step 4: Share, Share, Share

This is an underrated life hack anyway.

Share what you try. Share how the tools fail you. Share your wins.

Share it all.

Why? I can think of a dozen reasons, but let me be clear: You need to become the puppet master, not the puppet. If, and when, these tools start to change the modern work life, you need to be positioned on the top.

Perception is just as important as skill (sometimes, unfortunately, even more). How the world sees you is correlated with your chances of landing on your feet as our work gets digitized at a breakneck speed.

Invest in tools and courses, study, share to teach. That’s the cycle.

Where are we Going?

I don’t know.

Nobody really does.

And anyone who claims to know is either lying or delusional. Sure, someone will be right, of course! But at this point it’s of course impossible to say who exactly.

So the foolproof strategy is just to stay on top of it and ride it out. And not to worry about it. All it takes is a bit less Netflix and pointless scrolling, and a bit more building on a daily basis.

Simple, really.