My First "Lucid Dream" (???)

I've never tried to 'lucid dream' because I always wondered: what's the point. Nonetheless, a new experience this morning...

In the dream:

First of all, a helicopter was dive bombing me in the hot tub...then shot back up at the last moment.

Little bombs dropped out the sky around the hot tub. They were Fischer-Pricey. As I went to touch them, I said, "well, they're not real." (How did I know that?)

"So I won't feel anything," and THEN I said, "I must be hallucinating."

Because the logic at the dream was more likely that I was visually hallucinating for no reason than for me to be dreaming :D.

I noticed how the light reflected off of them and thought, "They certainly look real. That can't be accurate" Then I picked one up, "Hey! I feel this!" I was confused.

I didn't even think about the third possibility: that I was in a lucid dream.

I don't know if this is a lucid dream, but it was me being aware of being in a reality that wasn't real. So that's the closest thing I've ever experienced. Hm.

Do Women Get Sick when they Stop Loving?

I had an interesting conversation with Claude...

Can AI 100x You? (or: "What they don't tell you at AI Business School)

If you want to create a billion dollar business all by yourself, it's no longer about, "Well, let me hire another person and then I'm going to be twice as efficient."

No, now it's about, "can I make a tool that makes me a hundred times as powerful, a hundred times as effective, a hundred times as efficient for this particular thing that I'm doing?"

As Alex Hormozi says: "Running a business is about managing constraint. So you have to find where the bottleneck is and you have to widen it," and you have to do that 10 times a week for years, to get the result.

Now that I have AI, the question has been, "Where are all the hidden constraints I've been accepting?"

Accepting, digitally. Accepting with computers in general. Accepting in business processes.

Honestly, five years ago I kept telling my partner, "I'm going to need 20 Filipinos to even begin to process everything that I have written."

Why Filipinos? because according to my thinking back then, they would be the lowest-cost English-speaking workers that I needed and I needed a lot of them.

And I had visions of two very particular pieces of software that I knew would cost hundreds of thousands if not millions to develop.

The first would track your personal development for your entire life.

The second would be like Netflix, except for how I wished Netflix would be.

Now I have AI. And those products are both pretty much done.

It's like having a bunch of: middle-school through Ph D students (depends on the task and how you instruct them) to go through my existing content or implement projects or whatever.

And now the challenge for me is...

What can I actually unconstrain now?

Every step:

1. Create product(s)

2. Optimize product

3. Find market

4. Communicate to market

5. Sell

6. Deliver service/product

7. Follow-up/troubleshoot

8. Management/operations (finances etc)

Above all that is 'managing self'. Because if you are getting multiplied a hundred or a thousand times, every little tweak in your state and abilities is very important.

I have to look at where the constraints are at each in that process and optimize as I go along.

What you find when you start doing this is that there are literally dozens and maybe hundreds of processes within that chain. And if you do them manually, by yourself, you're working at... 1x.

With constant task and context switching.

And if you optimize one point by 10x or 100x, then suddenly you have to optimize along the entire chain

Software in itself used to be one of the great multipliers.

Now, It's kind of a commodity (in the sense that if someone spends enough time sitting at the terminal and talking to their computer, they can create software).

Begin at the beginning

For me, the secret was optimizing product first.

I needed to take an existing industry, and:

1) Be able to deliver at 100-1000x efficiency

2) Not be dependent on AI (for the core value delivery)

3) Have a natural moat which compounds instead of erodes over time

4) Has a natural, logical progression through multipliers

Found it.

Did it.

And, as a bonus: It actually solved one of my basic problems. So I was dogfooding and helping myself and my clients at the same time.

What they don't tell you at AI business school

What I found is that the tooling or allowing myself to work more efficiently was just as important as the product.

I have a half dozen new live systems running right now.

I created 25 tools that helped me be more efficient working day to day.

Now, if there's anything that I'm missing as I'm working, and I wish it were different and it could be solved by a software I just... open up a new project and spin up Claude and create it.

And each tool has added maybe five or 10% to my efficiency. So you can imagine the compounding over time.

What DOESN'T scale

So far, the only thing that I don't think I have really figured out how to scale is L1 content creation. The bottom level.

Which, and I'm gonna throw in another idea here, really shows us what AI and life is about in the first place.

There's only one constraint on you, and that is that you can only pay attention to one thing at one time.

Sure, now AI helps you do anything. But if you can do anything, choosing what to do is that much more important.

I didn't realize this was going to be so long.

But now that I've written it, I see a bunch of other articles need to be written as well.

Questions? Send them to me. I reply to everything. (Not automated--yet!)

[Task-switching constraints] [Delegation constraints] [Content creation constraints] [Content publishing constraints] [Product/service delivery constraints] [Client acquisition constraints] [Process constraints] [Creativity constraints] [Integration constraints] [Operations constraints] [Software dev constraints (with req, design, dev, testing, maintenance etc constraints)]

1-Man Billion Dollar Business

They say in the future, there are going to be one-man billion dollar businesses. On it.

One step is to build a hundred person team entirely out of AI.

MEET SIERRA!

Sierra is my first AI employee. My Virtual, Virtual Assistant.

Training AI employees can be tough! If you think Gen Z has a short attention span, imagine an employee who forgets the conversation you had yesterday, or worse, the conversation you just had in a different room, 15 minutes ago even!

That's what it's like working with AI.

Much like an end-stage Alzheimer's parent, you find yourself architecting ways for them to remember things.

But there's a catch!

There's only a certain amount they can remember at once.

You can't just stuff in all the information you want, because then, they can't utilize any of the information you just stuffed in

So how much should we put in? One page? Five pages?

This is context and it's the foundation of all human relationships as well.

Are we in the bedroom? Are we at a dinner party?

Context is everything.

The key to building and holding context, I have found, is to create a system where you hand them the first breadcrumb and then they know which paths to follow from there.

Like "50 First Dates".

"Here's a videotape explaining who your husband and children are. If you have more questions, just ask."

The final AI issue

The final challenge is that, assuming you document everything that needs to be done in your company, and the employee knows where to find it, imagine that what they're paying attention to now is becoming more and more their total focus until they forget what you said at the beginning of the conversation.

Usually, that means they're getting good at solving the problem they're staring at from an inch away. (Though they can sometimes lose the forest for the trees, as well. )

Mostly, it means that whatever the most important instructions from the beginning were are lost after two or three auto-compacts. Which means, 'teacher, my brain is full!' (remember the Far Side?)

It's juggling.

And the smartest minds in Silicon Valley haven't fully solved this problem yet.

That's why...

My super-brilliant coding partner usually doesn't know what day it is.

So that's fun.

I have ways of helping with AI btw. LMK

You CRAVE My Wordsmithing

Okay, I'm creating a post here for the first time.

Because who doesn't want to hear from me every day?

Exactly. I hear nothing.

Because if you didn't want to hear from me, you would have cheered loudly right now.

"Love Me Shallow" (funny)

I was giving Allison a hug, and, as is my wont, I started doing a little bit of pressure point therapy almost instinctively.

Noticing she was finding it uncomfortable, I said, "Deep love".

She shot back, "Love me shallow, then!"

ha