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I almost talked myself out of starting this newsletter.

There's a voice in my head that's been with me a long time, and it likes to whisper that I'm not the guy to teach anybody anything. Who am I? I'm a dad. I'm a triathlete. I'm a guy with a full inbox and a kid waiting on a bedtime story. I'm not some tech expert on a stage.

Here's what I've learned to do with that voice. Thank it. And start anyway.

Because I need to tell you something it took me too long to figure out. You are not behind.

I know it doesn't feel that way. You open your phone and everyone's tossing around words like agents and skills and co-work and prompts, and it sounds like a foreign language spoken by people who somehow got fluent overnight. It makes you want to close the tab and go fold laundry. I get it. I was there not long ago.

Back then, ChatGPT and Claude were basically fancy search engines to me. That's it. I'd ask them a question here and there. And every single night, I'd have one help me make up a bedtime story for my son. Cute. Helpful. Not life changing.

Then one night I asked myself a small question. If it can do this, what else can it do?

And my jaw hit the floor.

Because it turns out this stuff is so much more than a search bar. It can help you sort out a budget question. Clean up an email you've been dreading. Take a half-baked idea you've been sitting on for months and help you build it into something real. Plan the week. Plan the trip. Plan the party. Untangle the pile of files rotting on your desktop.

Here's the part that got me. Once you actually start, the only real limit is your imagination. And get this. AI can help you with that too. Stuck on what to even do with it? Ask it. It'll hand you ideas you'd never have thought of on your own.

Here's how I picture it now.

There's an ocean out there. Enormous, brand new, full of fish. For a long time only a few people had boats. That's over. The boat is cheap now. The boat is AI, and it's sitting right there waiting for you.

You don't need to understand how the engine works. You don't need to memorize the name of every fish. You just need to climb in, point it somewhere, and start.

The sea is yours. Let me show you how to sail it.

That's what this is. Every week I show you one real thing I'm doing with AI, something from my actual life as a dad and a triathlete and a guy with too much going on. First I show you exactly how I did it. Then I tell you why it works. Then I hand it to you and say go do it, and make it better for yourself than I ever could.

I'm not above you on this. I'm a few steps ahead, and I'm reaching back.

One quick note. There are a lot of these tools, and they're all good. I'm going to focus mostly on Claude, because it's the one I've found most useful by a mile. Use whatever you like. The tool matters way less than the fact that you start.

No jargon. No hype. No making you feel dumb. Just one useful thing a week.

Your first trip out on the water. Takes 90 seconds.

Open Claude (claude.ai, free to start). Type this in, but swap in your real life:

That's it. Hit enter.

Watch what happens. It won't hand you generic junk. It looks at your life and gives you five real ideas. Some will be obvious. One or two will make you go "oh, I didn't know it could do that."

That feeling right there is the whole point. That's you, in the boat, for the first time.

Use case: Turning a brain dump into a plan

Next time your head is full and you don't know where to start, open Claude and just unload:

Replace that last part with your actual chaos. This is the move that converts people. You take the noise in your head and hand it to something that sorts it out for you. Try it once and you'll get it.

Here's a concept that took me a while to learn, and it's the single biggest difference between people who get a little out of AI and people who get a lot.

Context is everything.

AI is only as good as what you tell it. The more it knows about you, the better it gets. Think of it like briefing a new babysitter. If you just say "watch my kids," you get one thing. If you say "watch my kids, the youngest is scared of the dark, dinner's in the fridge, bedtime's at 8, here's my number," you get something way better.

So don't be shy. Tell it who you are. Tell it what you're trying to do. Tell it what "good" actually looks like to you. People who treat AI like a search engine get search engine answers. People who treat it like a smart friend they actually brief? They get magic.

That's the foundation. Everything else we'll ever do builds on it.

I'll go first, since I'm the one asking you to come along.

Story time with my son is sacred. For both of us. It's the last thing we do before lights out, and I'd protect that twenty minutes with my life.

For years I made the stories up off the top of my head. Then I got smart and started having Claude help me spin them up, tailored to him and to whatever was going on in our week. Then it grew into something I never planned. The stories became ongoing dialogues built around our pets. They've got personalities now. Distinct voices. The whole cast has evolved over months, night after night, and I've got a real collection of them saved. I even have it make images for the stories, and I'll turn the screen so he can see them. You should see his face.

That's the bedtime ritual. But that's not really the story.

The story is the night I looked at what we'd built and thought, if it can do this, I wonder what else it can do.

That one question opened every door. The Bible study I'll show you next week. The books on my nightstand. My training. My finances. All of it traces back to a dad making up stories for his kid and getting curious enough to ask one more question.

That's the whole thing. This isn't about replacing what you do. It's about having a genius friend in your pocket who's always around to help you do it better. Start with the one small thing you already care about. Then ask what else it can do.

Next week we go fishing for real. I'll show you how I turned the book I'm studying right now into an actual conversation, and how you can do it with whatever you're reading.

Until then, guess what. You're not behind. You're early. And it's all okay.

Stop overthinking it.

Just get started.

JGS

P.S. Hit reply and tell me one thing you're hoping AI can help you with. I read every email, and your answer might shape a future issue. You can always reach me right here.