AI is not going to literally take your job. But your boss, another employee, a new job applicant, or your competitors might. Any one of them could learn to use AI well enough to do what you do, faster or cheaper, and your clients or employer may not need you anymore.
In the long term, yes, everything might be done by AI. But that's not tomorrow or next year, and if it eventually happens there's nothing any of us can do about it anyway. So what's the point in worrying about it?
It's clear that learning AI matters in the short to mid-term. But how do you go about learning a completely new technology?
If you've been on social media recently, you've probably seen all sorts of people saying things like, "Here's the prompt I use to do this one thing. You can get it for free. I have a hundred different prompts you can use. Look at this workflow I just created. Here's how you can use it."
The problem with any of those approaches is that it's still overwhelming. And if you don't know how to use AI, just using somebody else's tool isn't really empowering you.
Think of it like a custom suit. A suit tailor-made for somebody else still doesn't fit you. You need your own.
There's also the fact that AI is changing so fast that by the time somebody turns a workflow into a course or tutorial, it's probably already outdated. I've experienced this myself more than once.
And then there's just the time. I don't have a few free hours a week to dedicate to learning something new. Nobody does.
The way to learn AI, and I think the way to learn a lot of skills, is to put yourself in a situation where you actually need to use it. Do people learn a foreign language better by going to a class after work and reading books? Or by visiting a country where that language is spoken and figuring out how to get by?
From experience, and from everything I've heard, immersion wins every time.
It reminds me of when I was a kid, trying to learn to rollerblade. I grew up in California in the eighties, and everybody was learning to rollerblade. I couldn't do it. I was terrible at it, and afraid of falling, which made it even worse.
One day I was trying to skate around the cul-de-sac in front of my house, ready to give up, and thought, "Well why don't I grab a hockey stick and see if that helps?" (there was a hockey stick in my garage for some unknown reason) I grabbed the hockey stick and a tennis ball (to use instead of a puck) from the garage and went back out into the street. Almost instantly, I was learning to rollerblade, without even thinking about it.
I needed it because now I was trying to play hockey. My purpose was different.
I think learning AI works the same way. At least it has for me. I told myself for months that I needed to learn AI, and yet I never had a few extra hours in the week for it. I never made time for it. I never did it.
Until I actually needed it. I had a specific task I wanted to accomplish, something I felt AI would be extremely helpful with. That's what finally got me started.
Since then I've used it for more and more things. I can say without question it has saved me tens of thousands of dollars. And that's entirely because I started by asking it to help me do things I actually needed to get done. That was the incentive I needed to sit down, work with it, and learn from it.
I've been an SEO consultant for over 20 years. And I can see the writing on the wall. SEO pros who know how to use AI are going to be able to do ten times the work of those who don't. That's just the reality.
So what I've been doing is trying to essentially take my own job: taking all the skills and knowledge I've built over 20 years and turning them into repeatable processes that AI can help me do.
That's how I stay up to date. I learn AI by using AI, not by watching videos about which prompts to use or downloading somebody else's workflow.
And I'll tell you, AI is a lot more than just prompting. If you really want to get the most out of it, you can't rely on somebody else to tell you what to do with it. That's what I do with AI. That's how I teach it. And that's the approach that will help you hold onto your own job, or your own clients, as this technology keeps evolving.
Think of something you need to do, some task or small project you've been putting off that is relatively stand-alone. By stand-alone I mean something that isn't deeply connected to other areas of your life or work. Something that, at least for now, is more of a one-and-done type of project.
Preparing your taxes wouldn't be a good example. That's dependent on a lot of other information and would require a lot of data to get useful results from AI.
For me, one of the first things was nutrition. I was wondering whether the supplements I was taking were actually doing anything, or whether I should try something different. There's so much information, and so much marketing hype around supplements, that it's hard to know what's worth taking. Or whether to take anything at all.
That became one of my first useful AI projects. I thought it would be a one-and-done thing. It's actually grown into much more. I now find AI helpful with almost all areas of health. But I started simply, by sharing:
- My age
- My current supplements
- My general health goals
- Any medications I was taking
- Any issues I was facing, like trouble sleeping, trouble waking up, or high anxiety
The result was that AI helped me cut some supplements I didn't need and find better ones to replace them. I genuinely do feel better.
It doesn't need to be nutrition or supplements, but it can be if you'd like.
If nothing comes to mind right now, that's okay. I couldn't think of something either when I first started. Just keep it in the back of your mind. The next time you're doing something, it might occur to you: "Oh, AI could probably help me with this." That's how it works for me most of the time. I can't force it, but when I stay aware, the opportunity tends to show up on its own.
Once you have something in mind, gather up all the information that relates to it. For the supplements project, that meant my age, my current supplements, my health goals, any medications I was taking, and any specific issues I was dealing with. Add as much as you can without overcomplicating it. The goal is a focused, stand-alone conversation, not a deep dive into every area of your life.
Then just start. Tell AI what you want to do, give it the context, and have a conversation. Ask if and how it can help.
Providing that context is really the most important part. Think about what AI would have said if I'd simply asked "what supplements should I take?" It wouldn't have been very helpful to me personally at all.
I hope this helps,
~ Meredith's Husband
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