The Only Skill You Need to Succeed in the AI Era Mindset:Ultimate Guide

Introduction:

The pace of AI advancement is accelerating faster than most people realize. AI isn’t just becoming quicker—it’s mastering nearly every skill that humans have traditionally relied upon. After spending the last 5 years building AI companies, training teams, and helping founders redesign their workflows around AI, one truth has become crystal clear: the people who will survive and win in this new era aren’t necessarily the most skilled at AI. They’re the ones who think about AI in a completely different way.

Success in the AI era requires mastering specific mindset shifts that separate those who get left behind from those who thrive. These aren’t just theoretical concepts—they’re practical frameworks that will determine your ability to leverage AI effectively while remaining irreplaceable. The trait you need most isn’t technical expertise. It’s something far more fundamental, and understanding it starts with reshaping how you approach AI entirely.

Using AI as a Trainer, Not a Crutch:

Most people fear that AI is going to make them dumb. They believe if AI thinks for them, their mind weakens. This mindset is fundamentally flawed. It’s almost like saying a calculator makes you worse at math. The reality is different—calculators just allow you to do more.

The truth is powerful: if AI can strengthen your thinking, you will get sharper and more dangerous. Being an entrepreneur has improved times 100 because of AI. The key distinction lies in how you use it.

The Homeschooling Example:

While traveling the world with kids who are homeschooling, the school said no, using AI to do their work. But there’s a massive difference between using AI to do homework versus using AI to learn. What happened next demonstrates this perfectly.

The approach involved sitting down and creating a system prompt that’s specific to each kid. It takes the thing that they’re interested in—soccer—combined with who they want to learn from—Ronaldo—, and it teaches them physics, math, and English through that lens. The results? When they’re doing the test, 100% 100% 100%.

Did that make them dumb? Absolutely not. It taught them to learn faster. You have to use AI as a helper, not a crutch. Once you start using AI to level up, you will start noticing something new.

Developing Taste to Recognize Excellence:

Some of the ideas AI presents, some of the content, some of the decisions it suggests—they just feel better, and you can’t explain why. This brings us to the second critical mindset shift: taste.

Taste is essentially your ability to spot excellence instantly. The only way your taste can grow, your ability to find it, is through excellence in, because then you can find the excellence out. This means you have to get exposure.

Learning from the Masters:

Consider Rick Rubin, the music producer. He’s worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga, and Adele. When he hears music, he can’t tell you what is going to be great. He can just tell you when he hears it. As he admits: “I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music.” But he knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like. That is taste.

Excellence isn’t just random. It’s a pattern your brain learns to recognize. Your prompts to get AI to do things for you can only improve once your taste improves.

How to Build Stronger Taste:

Immerse yourself in excellence every day. The truth is, if your friends aren’t on the journey of trying to be the best at something, it’s going to be hard for you to find great stuff. If your co-workers aren’t always trying to find the best way to do the work, it’s going to be hard to be exposed to great work. The philosophy here is simple: proximity is power. If you want to improve your taste, go get around people creating excellent work.

Study the master’s in your field. Every discipline has masters. Hiring the best coaches to teach things makes sense because it’s better to pay for the blueprints, pay to be exposed to mastery. When you’re in it, that energy almost integrates into your beingness.

The best part is that even if you can’t pay for a great coach, they’re all out there creating content. For example, if you’re a startup and you want to learn how to pitch better, go on YouTube, and you will find these pitch competitions. You can search for all the top winners.

Use social media as a masterclass, not entertainment. Too many people waste their time doomscrolling, feeding their brains rot when they could be using their feed to feed their mind. Follow people who are 10 steps ahead of you. Find the people who are creating content. If you’re a chef, trust me, the chef creators are out there. If you’re an entrepreneur, they’re out there. If you’re a musician, they’re out there. Go use your feed and make sure it feeds you excellence by inspiring you to create great work.

When you see something great, ask yourself why this work. This gets your brain to analyze things and try to find the patterns. You want to teach your brain to identify the patterns of greatness. The more you can be exposed to it, the easier it’s going to get.

Most people just consume and leave it at that. It’s like reading a book. The goal is to consume and ask the question. That’s like studying a book. There’s a difference.

Mastering Vision to See the Future:

Developing taste helps you know what’s great today. But if you want to be successful in the AI era, you need to master your ability to see what will matter in the future. This brings us to vision.

Vision is the ability to see a future that doesn’t exist yet, but should. Most people don’t spend enough time in the future. It’s our job to actually know where the world’s going, to see 18 months in the future, to look around corners for our customers. AI gives you the space to think even bigger.

Real-World Vision in Action:

Recently, while mountain biking with friends, an idea about robotics emerged. The question became: how could I enter and invest and how big of a market could this be in the future? The solution was immediate—opening up the phone and loading up Grock, which has this version called Heavy.

It’s wild to literally execute 100 AIs at once doing research for you and coming back. The prompt asked for research and history examples and what could it mean and how many units and what would it be priced at and how much money that whole market could be over the next 5 to 10 years. It went off for 27 minutes and came back with an answer.

That answer allowed entry as an investor in the robotic space with a ton of confidence backed by data. It gave the data, but the vision for action was still required. That’s still on you.

Building Your Vision Muscle:

Block out time to actually do deep thinking. Every week, you should have a block time called thinking time. In that time, you literally force yourself to think about the future. Use that space to actually do research. Talk to the AI. Consider it a research co-pilot, a buddy.

Most people don’t get any thoughtful outputs because they don’t ask it any thoughtful questions. One friend has a sign company, and the advice was simple: “If you’re not looking into robotics, you should.” His response? “What? Why would I want to look into robots? I have a sign company.”

The answer: “Ask AI.” Next thing you know, he’s going to Brazil to the number one robotics event for sign companies. If you don’t use it to help craft your vision, you can’t build that muscle. That’s why you have to create time to actually think about it.

Study breakouts outside of your industry. If you already know what you know and everybody else knows what you know, then where’s the innovation? Where’s the breakthroughs? Look at examples like Henry Ford learning the whole assembly system by watching the meat packers in Chicago and applying it to cars. That’s where the innovation came from.

Taking inspiration from other industries creates breakthroughs. Taking stuff from media and applying it to AI, looking at music producers and asking “What can they teach me about creating software?” These connections might seem crazy, yet it is all connected. You’re not going to find the innovation at the cross-section if you’re not out there studying them.

Use AI to pressure test your assumptions and ideas. One favorite use case is putting the audio version where you can talk to it, that little blue bubble in ChatGPT, and going for a run while talking to it. Use it to help project scenarios: “What if this? What if I chose to do this? What if I sold this company? What if I decided to do this? What if I transferred people around?”

The more you talk to it, the more you’ll hear it reply back to you. It’ll teach you how to think about vision. You can even say, “Hey, I feel like I think too small. Force me to think bigger.” It’ll ask you questions that’ll get you to think bigger. Your AI can be your partner in learning how to think with more vision.

Staying Fresh with Daily Insights:

ChatGPT can actually send you a daily summary on anything. Having it analyze a previous day’s top trending news or things you need to know about as an AI investor, then hitting the play button at the gym so it reads to you every day—AI is keeping you fresh with new ideas so you can think about the vision and how those things could be connected.

If you do this, you’ll allow yourself to look way out into the future rather than staying stuck in your today. Being able to visualize the future is a superpower.

Showing Genuine Care That AI Cannot Replicate:

Even the best ideas die if people don’t want to help you execute them. There’s a shift that will transform you from an individual with just ideas into someone who people trust to implement them. This takes us to the fourth mindset shift: care.

AI can mimic intelligence. It does that really well. But it can’t mimic genuine care. Care is people feeling that you want to see them win, not just yourself.

Understanding Through Their Eyes:

You can’t solve real problems if you can’t see through their eyes. The best entrepreneurs can do that. AI can’t do that. The coolest part is the easiest way to show care to somebody else is to make other people’s needs your own.

Most people don’t understand the most valuable companies in the world. Nvidia has created 28,000 millionaires. Microsoft 12,000 millionaires. Jeff Bezos only owns 8 to 9% of Amazon. The company’s worth $2.24 trillion, which means that 91 to 92% of the money ever made by Amazon made other people rich.

If you truly want to be successful in this new AI era, then caring for other people will make you different. Everybody can use the AI tools, but you’re going to use the AI tools plus show up and make it about them. In a world of infinite outputs, care is the ultimate input.

Strengthening Your Care as a Leader:

Get to know your people, your clients, your community. Every time interviewing somebody, the same questions get asked: “In five years, you’re waking up, you’re living your dream life. What does it look like?”

If you can understand their dreams and goals, then you can figure out how to align the company’s goals to theirs. Then they wake up every day pushing themselves forward. There’s never a need to remind them. Be specific. Ask them about their family, their personal life, their desires. When they say they want to buy a dream home, know where and what it looks like.

Always ask for feedback from trusted people. The rule is simple: you can’t get better if you don’t know ways to get better. You can’t give feedback if you don’t ask for feedback first. If you have something you want to say to somebody to help them out, first ask them to give you feedback. That actually shows them that you care.

The ultimate form of flattery to somebody is to actually ask them their opinion. If they feel like you care, they’ll care about you. If they feel like you don’t care, they won’t care. That’s something AI cannot do.

Celebrate them. Too many entrepreneurs or leaders think, “Well, if I celebrate, then maybe they’ll take their foot off the gas.” That’s misguided thinking. Celebrate the milestones. Celebrate the success. The approach is praise in public, and if you have to criticize, do that in private.

Use the tools. Slack, shout them out. If they win really big, maybe share with your whole social media account. Just today, Sam, the creative director, posted a banger article on his page. Taking it and sharing it to the audience with “Follow Sam” shows people what excellence looks like and lets him know that work is appreciated.

The Whole Point of Business:

If that doesn’t convince you to care more, here’s one simple thing: the whole point of business is to develop people. If you wake up every day to be rich, you’ll go through a lot of people because you’ll have to keep going through people that are willing to wake up for a little bit and put up with that approach.

But if you actually wake up and make it about them, they will wake up to make it about the business. If you own the business, that’s how everybody wins. Don’t forget: we build the people first and the people build the business.

Be the Director, Not the Doer:

Developing all these mindset shifts is great, but there’s really only one trait that matters more to be defensible against AI: be the director, not the doer.

Most people treat AI like a faster pair of hands. It’s kind of like buying a self-driving car and then reaching over and still putting your hand on the steering wheel. Let it do the work. Winners treat AI like a team they direct.

The 92% Challenge:

A few months ago, at a leadership training, the message was very clear to the whole team. Every person in the company had weeks to demonstrate how they could get AI to do 92% of their work. Trust me, that confused people, scared people, and really worried people. But they needed to hear it.

There’s no future where AI can’t do your work. If you can’t figure out where it can support you at 92% and you become the director while it’s the doer, then you’ll always be behind where we need to be as a team.

AI will always be consistently more productive doing. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take vacations. It doesn’t complain. It doesn’t call in sick. Learn to set up the automations. Be the director, not the doer.

How to Become the Best Director:

Use the 10-80-10 rule. At the end of the day, the first 10 is 10% ideation. Sit down with your team, maybe your mentor. Collaborate. Ideulate. The other 80% is the doing. That is where AI can take whatever you gave it as an input and turn it into almost completed work.

That last 10% is that taste developed earlier. It’s where you come in and give it that final integration into the business. It’s Elon Musk going on stage and presenting the products they built, but the AI did all the execution.

Switch from push prompting to pull prompting. Most people get out of AI essentially a mirror of what they ask for. Innovation can’t happen if you’re guiding it based on your questions where you want it to go.

Instead of telling AI how to do it, tell it what you need and have it ask you the questions so that it can do it for you. AI has more information, more context, more wisdom than you’ll ever be able to even potentially remember in your brain. You have to actually have it guide you to the best outcome.

Think of it as fill in the blanks. Most people do all the work themselves and then go to AI to have it fill in the blanks. The better approach: have AI do all the work and then come in and fill in the blanks.

Build AI-first workflows. Pretty much everything in your life is a workflow. It goes from raw materials to finished goods, from idea to some kind of output. If you can figure out within there where you have bottlenecks and you can learn the AI tools to automate that and design it, that is the future of being a director in this AI era. You need to adopt that mindset.

AI can teach you how to set up everything. When working with a CFO to automate all financials, he at first said, “Well, I can’t do it because I don’t know how to do it.” The response was simple: “Write the code to integrate the systems.” And he wrote the code.

Oftentimes, people are just pretending not to know. The AI can literally write code for you to get anything done. By doing these three things, it’ll allow you to be the director, not the doer, and be successful in this new AI era.

Conclusion:

When you make this shift, AI stops overpowering you and starts empowering you. That’s how you stay ahead. Your biggest edge in the AI era isn’t speed or tools. The people nerding on what model should I use and what tool should I use are missing the whole point.

It’s actually becoming the kind of person who thinks clearly, leads boldly, and cares deeply. The humanity of it—people forget it’s human being, not human doing. AI is here to amplify you, not replace you. But you have to learn how you use it to still accomplish things in your world to add value to your customers, to your team, but if anything, give you the time back to be more you.

Think about it for yourself. What’s the one area that you’ve used AI in your life to get more time back so that you had that time to amplify who you are? Consider the different ways you can implement what’s been shared so that you can become more of yourself while AI handles what it does best.

The future belongs to those who master these mindset shifts. Start implementing them today, and you’ll find yourself not just surviving the AI era, but thriving in it in ways you never imagined possible.