Innovating with Intelligence: Part I

Happy New Year! I hope that your holiday season was filled with cheer, laughter, family, friends.

I also hope that the aftermath was rejuvenating and allowed your social battery to recharge! I know mine was depleted by time Jan 1st rolled around!

It is pretty common for many of us to look at the New Year as a time for revitalization — for some, a reset; for others, a chance to continue on their journey of growth, exploration, and success. We invite new opportunities, and get ready to face new challenges.

One challenge that I’ve seen the non-tech world facing over the last couple of quarters is the adoption of AI. To some, it is this scary entity that is harvesting your data, and, like a scene out of any major sci-fi tech movie, going to take over the world.

To me: I see it as an opportunity.

So to kick off 2025, I will be writing a series on AI from the perspective of an avid user, a web development agency founder, and a software engineer that builds with AI everyday.

In the spirit of using technology to empower others to innovate & inspire, which is a core mission of this newsletter, my goal is to help you navigate a world with Artificial Intelligence, and come along with me as I adapt my personal workflows, and offer my thoughts and experience on the good (and the bad) of what this newly popularized tool can do.

AI appears to be here to stay, so strap in. This is going to be a wild ride.

The Genius Zone

Any professional would agree that our most valuable resource is time; to the human mind, it is the epitome of a finite, and we don’t know exactly how much we have left.

Yet, we spend countless hours handling mundane tasks, brainstorming, planning, meetings, emails, and not enough time executing…

Not enough time creating.

Gay Hendricks calls this “the Genius Zone”. It is the area of our lives that we are most productive, fulfilled, and creative. It is the zone that entrepreneurs dream of being in 24/7 — though the reality is we only spend a fraction of our time in this zone.

Enter Artificial Intelligence, and how it can allow us to spend more time in our Genius Zone. This isn’t Alexa or Hey Google or Siri. Think of it as a personal assistant, that when prompted, has access to an unfathomable amount of information to help you get to the solution quicker.

As a developer, I use AI daily to solve problems faster. Instead of spending my time drawing out wireframes, sifting through stack overflow articles or MDN documentation, I can ask ChatGPT my specific question, and it spits out a coded response almost immediately.

Now sure, the code isn’t always 100% accurate to fit the specs of my application, but it gets me in the ballpark, and that much closer to the solution. What used to take me hours I can now do in minutes.

Here are some use cases for other fields of expertise:

→ Audio Engineering: prompting the AI to provide basic eq curves for mixing kick drums, snares, guitars, etc. to get you dialing in your sound faster.

→ While using creative tools: prompting the AI on the location of a certain tool in Photoshop or Illustrator, along with a tutorial on how to use that tool to achieve the desired effect.

→ Graphic Designers: using generative AI to provide you with inspiration for your next project.

→ Musicians: using AI to generate interesting chord progressions for songwriting, or to help you find an interesting word or phrase for your lyrics.

→ Content Creators: Using AI tools like ElevenLabs to help regenerate a section of voiceover that was lost during recording.

→ Entrepreneurs: automate repetitive tasks, such as CRM maintenance, Notion updates, meeting transcription, etc. to exponentially increase productivity output while minimizing time expenditure.

→ Developers: 10x your productivity with tools like bolt.new to quickly spin up the base UI for your next project so you can focus on the business logic rather than writing <div> salad 😂.

I could go on, but we’ll save that for later in this series. This first installment is merely an introduction to thinking about how AI can help you stay in that Genius Zone for as long as possible.

Before you go, this is the biggest piece of advice that I can give you:

It’s all in the prompt.

Computers will do EXACTLY what you tell them to do, so keep this in mind when crafting your prompts. The better the prompt; the better the response.

If you’d like to learn more about AI prompting, check out this article that I wrote last year on this topic.

I hope you found this interesting. Do you use AI in your day to day life? Reply or comment and let me know.

Build fast, break stuff, have fun.

Paps.