How to use AI to upgrade yourself
Building mirrors
The real product of work is who you become in the process.
I am of the belief that if you are not growing exponentially, there is a bottleneck or a problem to resolve. While at the same time growth is not linear and exponential when you look at it closely. It has plateaus and bursts of growth
Alex Hormozi has a great analogy which is that growth, success and self-improvement is like building a ladder. You have to build the left side and the right side and each rung. You don’t build the ladder evenly, sometimes the right side or left side might be built, but the middle is missing a rung, which prevents you from progressing.
There are an infinite number of ladders around for us to choose based on the industry and goals, and who we are but they all have similarities. The ladder never ends, after reaching one ladder, there is another one, we can always improve and become better.
We often suffer from a blindness because we have one field of view. We often get stuck but we don’t know why we are stuck. That’s because we are looking up. We need to be able to see ladder from 360 degrees.
It’s very hard to understand ourselves objectively, which is why it is essential to create mirrors around to seek feedback and how to improve.
There are six main types of mirrors we can use
Being around successful people
Romantic Relationships
1 on 1 Mentors
Hobbies and Other Interests
Reading biographies
AI
I will briefly touch on each one and share how they can help to progress along the ladder, and then focus on AI.
Being around successful people
This is one of the surest ways to progress, because you are basically meeting other people and seeing their own ladders, and you can ask their advice to look at your own ladder. This is great because often you can realise how simple it is to build the rest of the ladder. If they can do it, and you are just as capable as them, then you can do it too. And also you can absorb their thought processes which helps to improve and better able to progress. The psychological barrier to your own next step vanishes.
1 on 1 Mentors
Working with 1 on 1 mentors can also help because they can give feedback and suggestions based on their own experiences. It’s like hiring someone who has built their own ladder to help you build yours. The main trick is finding someone who can help best. The value here isn't just advice - it’s the precision of their feedback based on having made your exact mistakes already.
Romantic Relationships
A truly aligned partner is the most intimate mirror you will ever have. Romantic relationships are a great way to accelerate your own success because, if it is healthy, you both want the best for each other. In a great relationship both people are improving themselves, to be the right person for their partner, and then improving their partner, so they get into a loop of self improvement creating a compounding effect on both your lives. You can also overcome relationship challenges and the answer is often that you need to improve.
Hobbies and Other Interests
Often we can progress by working on other things such as art or writing or martial arts. We will often meet the same sorts of challenges as we do in our work, and we are presented with a different way of looking at it. For example, if someone has a discipline problem, they might not realise it if they work for themselves as an artist, but if they are training in martial arts, their peers and coach will often point it out.
The tree of knowledge is also deeply connected, and learning another topic can also reveal universal truths that apply to everything else.
Reading Biographies
Reading biographies also gives us a way to understand the life trajectories of others, the challenges they overcame and decisions they made. This helps us to zoom out and see things differently.
AI
AI is a new technology that we can use ourselves and it serves as one useful tool in the above framework. AI is the first "mirror" that is both objective and can be proactive. While human mirrors have egos and schedules, AI is a 24/7 analytical partner so you can stay up until 5am to resolve an issue and break past it.
With AI you can reveal your challenges and thought processes for feedback and suggestions which serves as a universal mirror that has access to the world’s knowledge.
In order to use AI to improve yourself, you can upload your own goals, philosophy and journal and notes for feedback periodically and it can analyse and give feedback.
But the problem is that for AI to give you the right feedback and to really understand you you need to present it in the right way.
Writing, and giving it that data, is one first step.
It helps to have a framework for that, but also to turbocharge it with the other areas.
Writing and getting your thoughts on paper is one crucial step because when we write we think more clearly and it helps to resolve recurring thought processes and see them more clearly.
Learning skills that will be useful.
Identifying, building and upgrading your identity.
Definitions - one problem with AI is that many of the suggestions it gives are generic, which is because it is trained on the average of the world’s data.
Goals and goal tracking
Timeboxing
Etc.,
That’s what I’m building for myself, my own personal platform to improve myself.
One of the differences between how many of us use AI is that it is reactive. We prompt it to get to know the answer. But the problem is that we often don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why it needs to be proactive.
Then we can build a loop where the AI is constantly giving feedback so we can grow exponentially. Together with the other mirrors that can help we can overcome and keep building and progressing.
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