This is a message primarily for my email list.
I actually have not emailed my list in weeks, which is crazy because for the longest time I was in the habit of emailing my list every single day, or at least four times a week.
But I went on a 10-day trip and I’ve been really focused on a new project that is taking all of my time.
So, I wanted to create something today that hopefully will be of value to my email subscribers.
The topic is AI, the truth about AI, at least
- my take on it
- how I’m looking at AI
- and how I’m using AI
This is interesting for me because in the home business space especially, I’ve seen some different takes on AI and I think I have a unique perspective and a way of looking at it that might be valuable to you.
The information from this entire post is all contained in this video so you can click play below and not have to read everything below if you want… 🙂
or, you can keep reading, if you prefer…
Beyond the Hype: Is AI the Home Business Silver Bullet You’ve Been Waiting For?
Obviously, AI is the hype of all hype things that have ever existed.
In home business, one of the things I’ve been trying to get away from is hype, blowing something up so much bigger than it is. That was a part of a lot of my early days in home business.
But then I eventually realized the big problem with it.
“Hype works great for sales conversions, but it’s murder on retention.”
Here’s how it manifests in home business, which I’m sure you have seen.
It’s all about making something look so easy that you almost don’t have to do anything and you can make a bunch of money.
You don’t have to have any skills. You don’t have to put in any time, but somehow you can still make a bunch of money with this thing.
And that idea continually recycles itself in a bunch of different areas. There are new businesses and systems that pop up that have this same idea. “Oh, with this system, you don’t have to put in any time. You don’t have to have any skills. And you don’t have to do much.
But yet with this new magical system, you can make a bunch of money.”
Nowadays it’s with AI and we see this everywhere.
The thing that makes AI even more hyped up than anything I’ve ever seen is it’s not just the home business profession talking about it, it’s everybody and world leaders and some of the smartest people in the world talking about this crazy, exponentially advancing technology.
And so the hype is not just contained to the home business space, it’s also all around us everywhere.
This is a crazy time to be alive.
I was gone for 10 days at a family reunion, camping.
We do it every year. It’s my wife’s family reunion.
While I was there, normal people not in home business, not even in business, were all talking about AI and how it’s going to replace jobs, and there’s fear around it, and on and on.
So this is obviously a topic that’s occupying a lot of our mind space these days.
Good, Bad, or God? Decoding the Three Dominant Narratives About AI
The three takes that I’ve seen on it basically boil down to this:
- It’s bad
- It’s good
- It’s God
Last week, I saw a post from one of my dear friends, a home business professional, talking about how AI is just not great.
Then I see another post from another friend of mine who’s very successful in home business talking about how AI is great, and if you don’t adopt it, you’re gonna be left behind and “screw all the people who are talking smack about it.”
So I saw these two contrasting posts and I just had to look at them and think, this is interesting.
One is that it’s bad, and the other is it’s all good and adopt or die.
And if you look at all the things people are saying about AI, usually it boils down to those three things. It’s bad, it’s good, or it’s God.
And when I say it’s God, I mean in some cases, metaphorically, that it’s God-like powers, it’s gonna be able to do everything.
And also, literally, some people are talking about AI as becoming God, super intelligence.
They’ve actually been talking about that for a long time.
The Surprising Link Between Money and AI That Will Change How You See Both
Here’s my take on it.
I thought this might be helpful.
I read something, I think it was from T. Harv Eker, and the take was on money.Â
And then you have a lot of people on the other side of the category of money, which is it’s good, it’s all that matters.
“We gotta get as much of it as we can. We gotta step on people to get there.”
Like the quote from Napoleon Hill where he says, “To step on another man’s face on your way up the ladder of success is to make a mockery of the money that you’ve earned.”
And why would that quote even be relevant? Because there’s a lot of people who do that. They think money is the ultimate good and so they hurt people in the process of getting it.
But again, here’s the point.
We have the topic of money.
Some people say it’s bad, some people say it’s good.
And here’s the best take in my opinion, and this take also applies to artificial intelligence.
T. Harv Eker said money is extremely good in the areas in which it works and terrible in the areas in which it doesn’t work.
If you think about that for a second, money is so good in the places that it works like paying your bills.
In my early story, I had a son that needed a $50,000 surgery down at Primary Children’s Hospital. I didn’t have the money, but I needed the money.
So then I got the money through home business, and I’ll tell you what, that was very, very good to have that money.
It’s been good to be able to pay off my debt. That’s been a great thing. It’s been good to be able to buy some nice things for my wife.
We drove used cars for many, many years, and it was just a few years ago that we bought my wife a very nice, near new Suburban because she had gotten in an accident and her other one, somebody t-boned her.
It was a very bad accident. Thankfully she walked away okay.
But we had to go shopping and originally we were gonna try to find a Suburban to replace the one that she had.
It was older, but it was really nice and it had high miles, but it also had had a new engine put in it.
So it was low cost, but it served the needs of our family.
And as we got to looking in the market, we could not find anything to replace it.
We ended up walking onto this one car lot and this one suburban caught my wife’s eye and that Suburban was probably about eight times the cost of the one that she’d wrecked.
And so when I noticed she was kind of liking this suburban, I was like,
“Oh wow, this is a lot more money than we’ve ever spent on a vehicle before.”
But she liked it and she needed a new car.
So as we started thinking about it, we were like, “Well, we have the money thanks to the home business profession.
Let’s go ahead and do it.”
So we bought her the car and that was a really, really great thing.
So money is good in the areas in which it works.
It’s not good in the areas which it doesn’t.
Money doesn’t do very much with your relationships, in your marriage.
I mean, money can help.
Like having money reduces the stress of not knowing how you’re gonna pay your bills, that’s helpful..
But as far as interpersonal relationships, listening, showing empathy, seeing the other person, letting them feel seen, having good intimate conversations, and an environment of trust in a relationship, money does no good for those situations.
My friend Alby had a really good point on our Grow Rich Mastermind last week.
He said, “Imagine that this was your last day on Earth and you were trying to figure out if you were given the option to buy another day, how much money would you pay for that other day to live on this earth?”
And he was talking about how you’d spend all your money, you’d get as much as you could.
And then he said, “But the thing is you can’t use money to buy another day.”
When it comes to AI, my take on it is the same.
AI is extremely good in the areas in which it works and not very good in the areas in which it doesn’t work.
The One Mental Shift That Can Give You Genius Powers in the Age of AI
It’s not a situation where it’s all good or it’s all bad.
It’s a situation where we have to think like Robert Kiyosaki taught me many years ago, where he said in one of his books,
“Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.”
This is hard for people.
Most of us, we wanna grab a person and put ’em in a bucket that says “bad” or put ’em in a bucket that says “good,” so we’re done with it.
We don’t wanna have to think, we don’t wanna have to look deeper.
We don’t wanna have to see the nuance and the complexity that’s really in everything.
Maybe this is because Henry Ford one time said,
“Thinking is the hardest work in the world. That’s why so few people engage in it.”
And thinking just involves seeing the bigger picture, seeing that there are details in this thing we call money and this thing we call AI.
And we really can’t just put it in a bucket that says, “all good” or “all bad.”
There are distinctions, right?
And this is intelligence.
According to Robert Kiyosaki,
…intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.
Practical AI Magic: Specific Ways to Supercharge Your Live and Home Business Today
So when it comes to AI use cases, this is the question I think we will want to ask:Â
The first one is “how-to” stuff.
If you do not know how to do something where the steps are known, AI is incredible.
It’s like the old Google or YouTube we used to use. “How do I succeed in a home-based business?”
We’d go to YouTube and maybe we still do.
But when I first got online, “How do I generate leads online?” I don’t know how to do it, but I think that would be awesome if I could figure it out.
So I go to YouTube, I go to Google, and I’m watching videos and I’m searching through stuff.
Well, AI fills that role as well, where if there’s something that you don’t know how to do, it’s really, really great for giving you steps.
I’ll give you just one example.
We went camping, as I mentioned, to this family reunion, and every year we’ve got two batteries on our camper.
This may make you laugh, but every year I have to relearn how to hook up the stupid wires on these two batteries so that it all works right because you gotta hook up the wires correctly.
So every year I’m going to YouTube and finding a video, or I’m learning it, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna make a note to myself and remember this next year.”
And inevitably every year comes around, I’m like,
“Dang it.
Where did I put that note?
I don’t know.”
Well, this year it came time to put these batteries on my camp trailer, and I was like, AI!
So I was like, “Yo, how do I hook up these two batteries? Can you gimme step by step?”
And BOOM. Steps manifest perfectly!
I didn’t have to watch a bunch of videos.
I didn’t have to search a bunch of websites on the internet.
I just followed the steps and I could do it.
So AI is really great for how-to information and I would recommend if you’re not using it already, please use it for that, for learning new things.
When it comes to marketing, what I found is it’s incredible with writing headlines.
These days I rarely ever just write a headline myself and go with it.
Usually what I’ll do is I’ll go to chat GPT and I’ll say, “Hey, this is my headline. Can you gimme some variations of this headline?” or I’ll say, “Can you gimme some variations that will arouse curiosity and drive maximum desire in the reader to want to read more or click and open or learn more?”
And what I found happens usually is chat GPT or whatever AI I am using will give me 10 or so different headline variations.
Now, here’s where it’s not great, is not every single headline variation is good.
So I will just look through those headline variations and often, very often I can find one that I’m like, “Ooh, that’s better than what I originally had,” and then I’ll use it.
So it’s really great for coming up with headline ideas, but you still want to use your own brain and you’re going to want to have your own discernment and not just run with everything that it gives you.
You gotta kind of pick what it gives you. But it’s really, really good for that.
The Authenticity Dilemma: Should You Let AI Write Your Content?
As far as writing content goes, my personal take, I don’t really use it hardly ever, if at all to help me write content.
I might use it for spell checking, fixing the punctuation, formatting.
I might say, “Hey, you know, add a few emojis to this,” or whatever.
Or I might say, “Hey, here’s what I wrote. Can you edit this for brevity and clarity?” and then it might edit.
So I think for editing, it’s really, really powerful.
But when it comes to just having AI write everything for you, my friend Amy made a really good point.
She said, “I hate reading stuff that’s written by AI. I can tell instantly when it is.”
And as I was thinking about this, I was thinking to myself,
“Okay, Paul, how much AI-generated content do you read?”
Now this is excluding the how-to stuff that I consume a ton of because I’m always wanting to learn what I need to do next, and oftentimes I don’t know, so I’m asking and I’m reading.
So that, yes.
But when it comes to Facebook posts, books, I’ve never read a book written by artificial intelligence.
Would I want to read a book written by artificial intelligence?
Personally, I wouldn’t.
And I don’t know why that is, but I just wouldn’t.
I can’t see myself wanting to read a book that was not written by a human.
Now, a human might use AI and put their name and their face on the book, so maybe it’s been edited or whatever.
And yeah, I might do that, but I’m not attracted to the idea of reading long-form content that was written by artificial intelligence.
So how about you?
Let me know down below.
As I analyze that in myself, I’m agreeing with my friend Amy, that when it comes to having AI write you a bunch of stuff, probably not so great, especially in a home-based business where part of the goal is to help people get to know, like, and trust you, help them feel who you are on the inside, your soul.
If your content is all AI-generated, then you’re missing all of that, and then you’re missing one of the biggest purposes of content if you’re having AI generate all your content.
So I don’t think it’s very good for that, honestly.
From Workouts to Therapy: Unexpected Ways AI Can Enhance Your Life and Business
A couple of other things that I’ve used it for that have been fairly good.
Working out.
I like to exercise, so I’ve tested a couple of things.
By the way, xAI just came out with a new version of Grok, Grok 4.
There’s an announcement on the xAI X feed with the livestream.
If you haven’t seen that, that would be a cool video to watch to kind of get in the know about what’s going on with AI.
But supposedly it’s dwarfed all the other AI models just like that and they have third-party independent tests on it.
That was a little bit of a side note but it will be more relevant at the end of this post.
Back to how I’ve used Grok with exercise.
One morning I woke up and I was not motivated.
Grok has these different voice modes that you can talk to via the voice mode that you select.
One of the voice modes is motivation.
Typically, I don’t have much of a problem with motivation, but for whatever reason, this one day I really was just dragging.
I didn’t wanna do my workout.
I was laying on the floor and I was like, uuuuuuuhgh.
So I clicked on the motivation mode and I just started talking to this AI voice.
I was like, “Hey, I’m having a hard time getting going.”
And next thing I know, this AI voice is lighting a fire in me and guiding me through one of the best workouts that I’ve ever had.
And all the while as I have my headphones in, as I’m doing my different lifts, questions come up like, “Hey, what’s the form on this lift?” or, “Hey, could I be doing this better?” or, “Hey, how long is good to run for cardio?”
You just have these things that come up while you’re doing something.
And because I had the earbuds in my ear while the AI was motivating me, I could ask questions and get instant feedback during my workout.
It was really, really good.
So that is a great use case in my situation for where it worked really good.
Another one with the Grok voice mode that I tested a while back is it has a therapist mode.
Now I’ve never gone to a therapist, but for whatever reason, I had this one little thing I was thinking about and I was like, “You know, it’d be nice to talk to someone about this problem.”
So I clicked on the therapy mode and just started talking.
And at the end of the conversation, I felt like this AI voice understood me, validated me, asked me appropriate questions for deeper insight and I had an action step to move forward with where that problem wasn’t so much of a problem because I had hope because I had a new action step.
So in that case, it was super good.
I work from home.
I might not have anyone around me to think through and talk through issues like that.
So that was a really, really good use case for AI.
My Secret Project: How I’m Building Software with AI (And What It Means for You)
Another one that I’ve been using for the last few months.
If you wonder why I haven’t emailed my list for weeks, part of the reason is because I’ve been heads down working on a project that’s such high value in my mind that it’s caused me to reevaluate some of the things that were really important to me before, like making daily content, emailing my list, consistently connecting with people, answering Facebook messages.
These things that I used to think are so important (and I still think there’s importance there)… have taken a back seat.
This project, the potential of it and the amount of people I can serve with it and the amount of use I can provide with it just kind of trumps all of that stuff.
So I’ve been full-time into this thing, and this thing involves creating software with artificial intelligence.
I’m not a software engineer, nonetheless, in several months with AI, I’ve been able to create something that blows my mind.
And it’s looking like this project is going to be ready in time.
We have an event coming up and we’re gonna be showing people what we’ve been working on.
The point is, with programming and coding and software development, AI is extremely, extremely good.
So if that’s something that is of interest to you, this is one area where AI shines like the sun.
Now, I wouldn’t jump into AI software development unless you already have some ideas mixed with some strong desire, because it’s still not a walk in the park.
Some of the stuff that you’ll see online is like, “Oh, I built an app in 24 hours and now I’m doing 10 grand a month.”
You know, all these little stories making it seem so easy.
What I told my kids about my software development with AI experience is this,
AI doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it doable.
And this is coming from someone who has no coding background.
The reason I mention that is because if you’re gonna jump into that, I would recommend it if you have an idea that you’re very passionate about.
I’ve had many ideas over the last eight years since we started our company and have been building our company and building products and listening to our customers and listening to our affiliates.
There are all these ideas that have bubbled up, but we’ve been sort of handicapped in being able to implement them because of the barrier of software development.
I found that in working with software developers, there’s a communication barrier.
Oftentimes you communicate what you want, they don’t get it, and then they create something that doesn’t end up being what you wanted it to be.
There’s a price barrier.
To build big things, it’s very, very expensive.
And there’s a time to implementation barrier.
In a lot of my experience in working with software engineers, not all of it, but a lot of it, you say,
“Hey, can we do this?”
….and then you wait and wait and wait and wait.
And then maybe the thing gets done and you can look at it, “Oh, it’s not quite right. Can you fix this?”
…and then you wait and wait and wait some more.
This is why I’ve jumped into this area, but I have ideas and I have passion about what we’re doing.
So that’s been important because this has taken me literally months, and we’re still not done, of full-time effort of shutting everything else off.
So this is a case where AI is really, really good, but it’s still not God.
Is it overhyped or underhyped?
I guess It depends on who you’re talking to.
But if you’re looking at people who are like, “Oh yeah, just spin up an app and make a bunch of money,” yeah, that’s way overhyped because if you’re gonna do it, it’s gonna require a lot of understanding and a lot of persistence and a lot of “how do I work with these tools” and “how do databases work,” and so on and so forth.
But the point is, it’s possible.
It’s possible for a guy like me with no programming experience other than basic HTML and a little bit of stuff here and there to actually create software that works.
That’s amazing, right?
But it has taken a lot of time and effort and I’m able to put in that time and effort because I have the passion for it.
So this is another area where AI is really, really good.
This is an area where if I were to just rely on myself without AI, it would probably have taken me years to learn what I needed to learn to be able to get to the point that I’m at now that only took me several months.
So code is a really, really great use case for it.
All of this to say, AI, it’s really good in the areas that it works and it’s not so good in the areas that it doesn’t work.
And it’s important that in building a home-based business, we know those distinctions.
Forget AI Courses: Here’s the Real Way to Master Artificial Intelligence (IMO)
The last thing that I wanted to mention is when it comes to the hype with AI, there’s a lot of hype with it in the online course space.
I see ads all the time.
“Check out our AI training and learn how to have AI build your home business for you, or generate all your leads for you, or do all this for you.
It’s really, really easy.
Master AI with this course.”
They’re everywhere.
Why?
Because it’s the hype cycle, super hypey.
Everyone knows about it, everyone’s talking about it.
So of course there are gonna be a lot of people wanting to profit from it.
Have I bought any courses on AI?
I don’t think that I have.
(Correction, I did buy one from an actual software engineer… not a professional course creator).
And why am I not out there buying course after course?
Well, this is my take on learning AI.
My take is, use it.
Number one, what do you want to do?
You gotta know what you wanna do.
Number two is, can AI help me do what I want to do?
Then you start using AI and you start implementing, and you start testing and seeing if AI can be useful for you in this thing that you wanna do. T
hat’s my number one recommendation.
Another one though, is when it comes to following people in AI to learn what’s the latest and the greatest, what are models capable of?
I would say follow the people who are building AI, not the people who are selling courses on AI.
You know how I mentioned I watched the live stream with Elon Musk with their Grok 4 release?
That’s what I’m doing.
If you think about information, it’s like a waterfall.
Information is coming out like a waterfall and you wanna get as close to the river where that water is coming out as humanly possible.
At least this is how I look at it, especially with AI.
You’ve got Elon Musk building xAI, you’ve got Sam Altman building OpenAI with his team there, you’ve got the team at Claude, they’re building AI.
There are all of these people who are in it, literally in it and building it.
And these people are all active on social media and they’re active in public appearances and podcasts.
That’s how I’ve been learning about AI and that’s how I’ve been staying at least somewhat in the know on what’s available and what things can do.
And then of course, you still have to ask the question,
Can this be useful for me and or the people that I’m serving?
And then you just get in and you start using it.
I am a fan of learning.
I’m a fan of buying products that can teach you things.
I’ve purchased a lot of material over the years from mentors, people who had what I wanted and had information that I perceived could be really valuable for me at that time, so I didn’t have to go search it out.
So that is a good way to learn and I don’t wanna discount that.
But I also wanna highlight the other aspect of learning where you can learn by trial and error.
The thing about these courses in AI, they’re gonna teach you a bunch of prompts and teach you processes and these things you can do.
The problem there is you still have to go apply, and you’re still gonna have to be using the AI and you’re still gonna have to be testing and still gonna have to be checking the results.
This is one area where I feel like if you were to adopt the,
“I’m gonna know what I want, number one, and then I’m gonna adopt the test, test, test mentality,”
…you can learn so much from just using these tools, just using them, looking at the output, changing your input, just using them on a daily basis.
And I think if you integrate these tools in your life, in your business, you’re gonna learn far more than you ever probably would learn from buying a Facebook ad course on AI.
A Final Word and an Invitation
These are my thoughts.
Thank you for being somewhat interested in my view on this stuff.
I’m not really here to sell you anything.
I just wanted to get a message out to my email list and say, “Hey, I’m still alive.”
And yes, I’m still engaged very heavily in the mission of freedom through principle-centered leadership.
Still thinking about it all day long, working towards it all day long.
I’ve just had to apply myself in a new area to better facilitate that mission moving forward.
If you have any questions, comment below.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Am I way off?
Do you agree with some of the things that I’ve shared?
Has this been helpful for you at all?
Let me know.
And if you’re somehow finding this and you’re not subscribed to my email list, I would love to encourage you to click this link and pick up a free gift and subscribe to my email newsletter.
If you resonate with me, again, my mission is to help people be free through principle-centered leadership, build residual income as fast as possible, legitimately, and without hype.
In that mission, I’ve co-founded a company we started in 2016 where we have amazing products that serve people on this journey of building freedom.
And we have an affiliate program that is very lucrative; it pays 80% commissions.
Why did we do that?
Because we want to help people be free faster.
And one of the best ways to do that we thought was to pay people as much as we can.
We also have a charitable aspect to this business model where we donate a portion of all the revenue to an organization called Feed My Starving Children.
We’ve helped to provide hundreds of thousands of days of meals to kids in need.
And it’s an amazing community.
So that’s my main focus.
But as far as my content goes, when I get back to creating more, it’s all things home business: evaluating home businesses, mindset, philosophies, lead generation, conversion, retention, anything that is helping me and being useful to me on my path of being a home business entrepreneur.
Those are the things that I like to share with my email list.
So, if that is interesting to you, I would love to encourage you to visit this link and you can subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you some content sometime in the future.
I can’t guarantee it’s gonna be soon because like I said, I’ve been stepping back a little bit from content creation because we’ve got this big project going on, but I’m hoping this will be wrapping up a little bit, at least as far as being a constraint on my time here over the next couple of months.
That’s it.
I love you.
I believe in you, whoever you are.
I know you’ve got greatness within you, and I would love to encourage you to get out there today, take action, and always go for your dreams.
Thanks for stopping by.
Paul
