Nobody learned VLOOKUP from a tutorial. They learned it when they had a lookup to do and the data was sitting in two separate sheets and their manager needed the report by 3pm. You googled the syntax, fumbled through it once, got it working, and now you know VLOOKUP.
You're trying to learn AI the other way around. You're watching YouTube tutorials. You're reading "10 Best ChatGPT Prompts for Managers." You're waiting to understand it before you use it.
That's backwards.
The Problem I Had.
I heard people doing amazing things with AI. It sounded intimidating - something that would take hours to learn before it became useful. I tried ChatGPT a few times. It felt like Google with slightly better formatting. I went back to doing things the normal way.
Then I had real work to do. Data analysis on field staff patterns. I needed a second set of eyes on my thinking. I turned to Claude.
At first, it was impressive. Beautiful correlations. Perfect research documents. Charts that looked professional.
Then I looked at the real world. The correlations were obvious. The insights were surface-level. There was no "so what." No "wait, how does that actually help me make a decision."
The AI was doing the work instead of helping me do my work.
The Turn.
I read somewhere that you could give AI a role. That you should tone down the niceties and make it challenge your thinking instead of agreeing with everything you say.
I wrote something called the antifragile advisor. A skill - essentially a preprompt - that told Claude: your job is to stress-test my thinking, surface hidden assumptions, ask uncomfortable questions. Don't be polite. Be useful.
The outputs changed completely.
Instead of generating a final document, it started asking questions. "Have you considered this alternative hypothesis?" "This correlation - what's the mechanism?" "Your conclusion assumes X, but what if Y?"
That's when I realized: this isn't a search tool. It's not a writing assistant. It's something else entirely.
What Changed?
Once I stopped asking "what can AI do" and started asking "can AI do this specific thing I need done," the learning became a curiosity spiral.
