All right, welcome guys, we are live going YouTube and X
and we're just doing our weekly team training at Enovo.
And so here we're just gonna keep working through
training our team and potentially future team members
on some of our process and how we do things.
We are building, we're a product agency,
building a number of different products for ourselves
and then also building products for clients.
And so we're leveraging the shape up process,
we're highly leveraging like AI, of course.
And so we're gonna teach you kind of what we're doing
in real time and you guys can kind of follow along.
If you have questions, you can always drop comments.
And then we typically do this for like 20 minutes
and then we'll jump into some team chat after this.
So today I wanna just talk a little bit about
this journey of kind of what I'm calling
human deep learning in the age of AI.
And so we now have information,
access to all information, one prompt away.
We essentially have like, AI has a PhD in everything.
It just needs to be told kind of how to,
what to do and you kind of need to give it some guidance.
So the skill here is always like,
every time AI comes in at one level,
like you have to kind of, in your mind,
you're now getting a promotion.
So you went from developer to senior developer.
If you're like, it starts to do more of that job.
Now you're like helping more with like product management
or the business side or whatever.
Like you're kind of working your way up the ladder
and having AI kind of fill in behind you.
So no matter what your task is,
even if it's administrative, like take yourself as like,
okay, I'm an operations person now
and I'm gonna delegate all these things to AI
to help me with my job.
So in that age, when all the information is right here
at our fingertips, how do we actually learn things?
Because now it's like, well, do we need to learn?
And I've been going on this very interesting
but parallel journey and in no way,
like do, does this sort of connect with business
or I didn't do this because of business,
but I set out in 2021 or 22 to go get my pilot's license.
And so I've always loved flying.
I've always loved aviation.
And our daughter was born in April.
And I realized I was like, man, we are,
we're only ever losing margin in your life.
So like you get a girlfriend, you get married,
you have kids, like your margin just shrinks down
and down and down until you kind of look back.
And like when we were, had our first kid,
we're like, man, what did we do with our time?
Like before we had kids, like we just had all this free time
and we had literally endless amount of margin.
Then we have a second kid and it kind of like builds.
So you kind of lose margin as you go.
So I kind of saw that trajectory and I was like,
I'm either going to become a pilot now
and put the time in now and do this,
or it's probably gonna be when like our girls are 18.
And I was like, why would you wait all that time?
And I also like to think about things.
This is sort of like a tangent, but also somewhat related.
Like finding topics and interests and hobbies
is extremely powerful because one,
it gives you time to reset all the, you know,
and if you're trying to build things like on a computer,
try not to make your hobby building
slightly different things on a computer.
If you know what I'm saying,
like do something a little bit different
kind of stretches you.
And so it's healthy for a number of reasons,
but I didn't have a hobby for a while.
And I, that was very unhealthy.
And I was like, I don't need a hobby, works my hobby.
And that was kind of my line.
And I kind of wore it like a badge of honor,
but that's not a smart thing to do.
So you need a hobby, something different.
And I would also advise you, like sometimes in business,
there's like, oh, I'm gonna become a pilot.
It's gonna teach me how to like run a business better.
Right?
Like, no, that's putting like stupid pressure on yourself.
Like just enjoy it for what it is.
I'm not trying to like, however, in this case,
there are some similarities I'm gonna like point out today
that I have learned in that process.
So one, like this is a tangent, but have a hobby for sure.
That's something that's healthy to do, but also enjoy.
And also like when you're picking something,
I always kind of ask myself,
like what's the thing I would be doing?
What's the hobby I would have?
Let's say if I had like sold my business,
I made tens of millions of dollars in the bank.
And I'm just kind of like sitting on a Monday,
like what would I actually want to go do?
Well, for work, I'd like to be doing exactly
what I'm doing today.
Like building cool products, working with awesome people,
awesome clients, awesome team members,
and then coaching and teaching our process.
It's like, oh, that's what we're doing right now.
And if for like fun and a hobby, like I'd probably be flying.
Like even if I had enough money to buy a private jet,
I would still want to go learn.
how to fly my own plane.
Like there's just something really cool about it.
So it's not for everybody, um, but it is exciting for me.
So I was like, well, that stuff sometimes is a lot more, it's
a lot closer than you think.
So like, I don't want to wait until I'm like in my fifties to go then start
doing, living the dream, if that makes sense.
So that's a whole nother talk.
But the point is I went and I was like, cool, I'm going to go be a pilot.
So started out like, this is great.
There's a lot to learn.
I did a first discovery flight and I kind of got like, okay,
this is the really fun thing.
It's, it's really fun.
Um, it gets a little hard, but like, I need to kind of navigate
like how, um, I'm learning this.
And then I started to do some of the book learning and stuff along the way.
And for two or three years, I'll say for the first three, three or four
years of doing this, I kind of just went in these cycles of like getting
kind of good and then I would leave it for like a few months and I would
come back and try to like build up that skill again, and then I was
kind of like enjoying the fun parts of it, but not actually doing the real work.
I wasn't actually going deep enough into the learning to make forward progress.
And so this year I was like, I got to finish this by the end of the year,
because now it's going on like four years.
And if you were trying to like become a private pilot from not having any
knowledge to like, you know, passing your check ride, you can, you could
technically do that in 30 days.
Other people that do it in a couple of months.
Um, it's, it's not four years.
It's definitely not like an entire, uh, you know, four year degree.
It's, this is something you can do in a couple of months.
I've just extended it so long.
Um, and of course I'm doing it as a hobby, so justify not doing it at certain times.
So anyway, this is where we are.
So this year I decided I was going to go deep, going to figure this stuff out.
And so when you get into this, there's this like really fun.
Um, book called the far aim.
And it's this massive textbook with like tiny little prints of all the FAA
regulations and basically how to fly a plane and like best practices and all
this stuff, you basically have to learn a lot of these different things.
Um, in addition to that, I like bought these note cards.
I have 350 note cards here that I'm like aggressively trying
to memorize in the next two weeks.
Um, and so all that to say, like, I went deep and I, and I would want to be able
to like pick up any note card and answer a question they have this thing.
Um, when you become a pilot, you don't just take a multiple choice test and
then they hand over like your license.
That would be terrifying if you were flying with abuse because it has to be
regulated, um, the FAA and people there have delegate have to basically say, Hey,
you are approved and we trust you.
And now the public can fly with you and we say that you're a safe pilot.
So I love that idea of like in the age of like hacking and finding AI to like
do different things, like this was a very concrete thing.
You either are a pilot or you're not like you either get
the license or you didn't.
And so it's very, um, black and white and there's no hacks.
There is no scheming.
There's no hacks.
There's no, you just got to either go deep and learn the thing
or you, you didn't pass it at all.
So, um, I was like, I decided I'm just going to go deep and actually figure this out.
So I wanted to show you this little graph that I found.
I thought it was pretty helpful.
Um, this is pretty true and you can apply this to pretty much any, um, thing.
So the, you got experience and time.
So as time goes on, like you're like, yay, this looks like fun.
Like, and then you're like, Oh, this is kind of hard.
And then you're like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to keep going.
And you're like, cool.
I think I got it.
Or no, I definitely didn't.
Okay.
I don't know anything.
And then it kind of creeps up all the way to like, okay, I think I've
actually arrived at something that's like, as time goes on, I've
actually hit that experience.
And this year we did this right.
With, um, with, uh, our product, you know, uh, management.
So we, we, uh, we were doing shape up.
We all read the book.
We're like, this is pretty good.
I was like showing people, teaching our team.
I was teaching clients.
I was, you know, uh, basically like, Hey, we've got it.
And we're coaching people on it.
We're so good at this.
And then we had Ryan Singer come in for a few sessions with us.
And he first, he was like, we're going to do a three hour session.
So I was like, okay, that's, that's intense.
So like immediately, you know, in our mind, we're like, Oh, let's
like sketch something out in 30 minutes.
Let's do something in 45 minutes.
And so he was like, let's go and do this one tiny piece and
spend three hours on it.
And so immediately our whole.
Uh, paradigm kind of shifted as far as like, how did, like, we actually
have to go very deep and we got very, very, um, like meaningful movements,
but what we would have done maybe, you know, in an hour, he was taking maybe
multiple three hour sessions to go through and we're like, wow, there's
like a different way of doing this.
That is slowing down, actually going really, really, really deep
into this one product feature.
And that's when we kind of realized like, Oh, we, we thought we were
like, you know, an eight or nine out of 10.
What we didn't realize is the scale was from zero to a hundred.
So we actually were like, you know, eight or 9% there.
We weren't like, you know, uh, 80, 90% there.
It was, we were off by like a huge multiple.
And so as we go to deepen these subjects there, it's also kind of fun
because the process actually gets interesting and fun.
And when you kind of learn that craft and you get a little bit curious about it.
And so, um, same thing, like as, as I've gone through the pilot stuff,
like I'm actually going deep now and I'm actually learning a lot more
about weather patterns and regulations and how, like the mechanics of work.
And you kind of, you go deep enough and it's not just kind of memorizing, like
here's the definition of this thing.
It's like, Hmm, I wonder how a carburetor works and going on YouTube and watching
like a 45 minute video, the debrief, like diagram, like, how does a carburetor work?
And this can be applied for everything.
Like if you get curious, uh, let's say you're taking on a new technology.
We're, we're kind of delving into this world of, of rag, uh, you know,
um, agents, uh, for, for some AI things.
And so like, I've been going deep on these deep dives, like for
learning what this is, how does it work?
What are the mechanics?
It's not enough to just like prompt AI to go build the thing.
And then like, wonder why it doesn't work.
Um, it's going deep and you actually understanding it because once you
understand it, you can then instruct the AI to go, uh, and be extremely powerful.
Um, with that.
So, um, it's basically getting away from the center surface level area.
Cause we can all be sort of good at a lot of things today.
And with AI, it kind of make up a lot of the difference.
Um, but if you go deep and you learn these different, um, processes, you
actually learn how to think about the problem differently.
And, um, especially if you're doing a feature or a bug, you're really
learning from a client, like what really is the problem that's happening here.
We're going way deep.
It's not just that you need a button here and you want this, like, uh, you know,
this project requirements stock built, kind of going a few layers deeper as we
call founder therapy and kind of understanding what does this person,
what, what does this customer need?
What are they trying to actually accomplish?
What is the outcome they're looking for?
Um, and then how do we get there as fast as we can with this most simple
and most elegant solution, uh, possibly.
Cause typically as you learn and you actually understand this, it's being
able to turn around and actually explain it to someone else that's
really means you understand it.
So having to teach someone this thing.
So, uh, that's why we're doing training here, having different
people jump on and, and, and train as well.
And, um, I think that when you can kind of explain it to someone else,
you really do have mastery of it.
Um, and so, uh, there's a difference.
There's two tests that happen when you're doing your pilot's license.
There's this, um, knowledge test, which is you go into a testing room, you've
got two or three hours and you answer a hundred questions, it's all multiple
choice and just get a grade back.
Um, so I studied a bunch, memorized everything, and that's very much like
this kind of rote memorization, uh, technique where you just, you know,
the definition you plug in the, the, you know, uh, response and you just
see if you got it true or false.
I mean, you got it correct.
Um, when you do the final check ride, you do this thing called an oral exam.
So you sit down, uh, with this, uh, instructor and for two or three
hours, they just interview you and you can, it's just, you know, uh, it, you
can use a book and you can reference material if you need to, but you need
to really actually understand this.
It's not just giving back a definition.
It's going deep and they'll kind of in a true interview fashion.
If you kind of will kind of pull it one thread and kind of something seems
shaky, they'll just keep going deeper down until see how deep you can go to
understand how this thing actually works.
And a lot of the times, like you've, if you've heard of, uh, uh, Elon Musk,
we'll talk about going back to first principles.
If you can understand sort of the first principles of something, and here's
why, you know, a wing creates lift and it actually keeps you in the air.
If you kind of understand, um, how this, um, uh, Bernoulli's effect works.
For example, you kind of get down to these sort of basic principles, then
everything else, you can kind of build that on top of that foundation.
And we did this a lot with, with the product side.
Like once we kind of learned these tools, we knew how to do framing and
we knew how breadboarding worked.
And we went really deep on the process as a team, and we weren't afraid to
spend a lot of time to what maybe at the beginning seems like C like a small
progress.
Um, and so taking that time to, to invest in ourselves, to go deep and to learn
this, um, these are the skills that like, that, that, that is going to make you
extremely competitive in today's market because everybody has access to AI, but
I guarantee you, everybody's willing to just go surface level and you go deep on
something.
It puts you in a totally different, um, puts you like leaps and bounds, like
ahead of everybody else.
Um, because you both have access to the same AI tools, but if you have that
knowledge and that, um, the, you know, years of experience and you are actually
a senior developer and you've, and you've, uh, led other developers and you've
reviewed other work, you can go so much further, um, to leverage AI than if
someone's just, just kind of vibe, like a founder's vibe, coding an app.
Right.
Um, so, um, yeah, that's, that's kind of the main thing.
I just want to skim through here.
See if I had, um, any.
other things I wanted to share, but yeah, just basically don't be afraid. I was calling this
human deep learning and we talk about deep work. So I think these sessions are going to happen
inside of deep work is where you get the deep learning. It's not a scrolling on your phone,
seeing a reel about some new tech stack thing or whatever, and then that's how you learn something.
That is surface level, of course. It's watching the 45 minute deep dive. It's watching the three
hour deep dive video on this. I remember when we first got into AI and we first got into how
to leverage it in our business. Sahil from Gumroad had put out some three and four hour
live streamed videos where he just went piece by piece and walked through how they did their
actual work. And most people are not going to invest three or four hours in that. And I did,
I took time, I watched their whole thing and I learned how they were actually doing it in
their company. So don't be afraid of some deep work sessions, spending some time on the stuff.
If you are going into a new topic, a new tech stack, take the time, figure out how it actually
works, figure out people are leveraging it. What's the pros, cons of it? Become an expert
in that thing. We're diving into the world of like rag AI solutions and that's something I'm
going deep in. And I'm also using AI to teach me things. So that's also very helpful is
having it ask dumb questions. You can ask it dumb questions. You may not ask in a comment somewhere,
you may not ask it to a colleague, but you can ask AI some pretty dumb questions.
If you're a fan of The Office, it's Michael Scott who's trying to figure out what a surplus is and
either like, hey, explain it to me like I'm seven. And the accountant explains it and he's like,
I don't understand, explain it to me like I'm five. And that same thing is like, you haven't
dumb it down for you until you're like, okay, I get it now. I understand the core things.
And a lot of the times, when you're going into a new topic that you're not familiar with,
it is just learning the language. That is the main thing. One of the concepts I learned was
when you're learning a new topic, if you can just learn the definitions and the language
and the vocabulary of that topic, it all of a sudden kind of unlocks everything.
So just push through. It sounds all like jargon. It sounds very confusing at first,
but when you kind of get push paths and you go deep, you are going to kind of start to learn
things at a new level. So yeah, I would say don't be afraid of going deep.
Give your time. If you're planning out a new feature or some new tech, a new build of something
and you don't have mastery of that topic, that's something that's part of the context of this.
It's not necessarily a problem, but it's something that's worth mentioning. And don't assume that,
like, oh, I'm just going to kind of fake it and I'll figure it out. I don't want to be found out
or embarrassed that I don't understand this thing. If you're taking on a four-week or two,
four-week project on something and you don't understand how a certain technology works,
let's build a week or two in there to become an expert in that thing or at least get a
substantial amount of information into it, because that is part of the learning process.
Someone has to go and dig in and figure this out on behalf of the client or whoever's funding the
feature. And so I just want to make sure that we don't, one, we have an honest representation of
ourselves as far as if I was sort of skimming the flight textbooks, if I was sort of doing that and
I was like, hey, guys, who on the team wants to go for a flight with me? I don't exactly have my
license, but I get the gist. It's going to be fine. It's all good when you're working on a
project. I don't know if I'd get in a plane with you and be thousands of feet in the air.
So it's one of those things where just being honest and kind of real honest look at where we
are, what do I actually understand? And I've always taken the viewpoint that we are all
learning. No one's actually landing at mastery of building software. Because as soon as you hit it,
it's just another level. There's just always going to be another level. Even in running a
business, you're like, cool, I'm going to build my business and I make six figures in a year.
I'm crushing it. Now I'm going to try to make a million dollars in a year. And as soon as you do
that, immediately it's like, let's try to do five. And if you're like, do five, then you're like,
let's do 10, 10, let's do 50, 100. And just like, it never ends. So there's no one who's
mastering business. There's no one who's like,
mastering building apps. There's no one who's like even mastering flying a plane. Every single time
you fly, you're learning something. It's just being in this mindset of always improving,
always refining and going deep. And the sooner you just deal with all, overcome all that
resistance and just decide, okay, I'm going to go deep and just start diving into the three hour
videos and watching the lecture and actually doing it and prototyping and all that yourself,
that's when you kind of learn, it kind of fast tracks you on that path of actually
getting substantial knowledge in there. Because a lot of times we can just keep avoiding it.
And we're like, I'll just kind of learn enough. And I kind of was like just enough to get by.
And I had this mindset for years. And it works in school, whole nother topic. But this is why school
is a horrible idea in general, especially college, I wouldn't recommend it. But I don't think I
probably go to school, I mean, to a college, because this is something that's so easy to just
remember and regurgitate knowledge and not actually have deep understanding or learning sort
of the life skills that you need. And so I was able to skim through school that way. And that's
what's really fun about learning how to fly is you can't have any hacks, like you can't hack this.
There's no shortcuts, there's no scheming, there's no like workarounds. And AI can only get you that
far. Like I have AI, I'm using it to help me like quiz and stuff, but it's pretty dumb. Like
you'll quickly realize that it's knowledge. And once I'm now like able to correct chat GPT on
like some of the regulations, now I'm like, I think I'm starting to understand this.
And I'll like question certain requirements. So that's kind of maybe how like what going deep
actually means. So that's what I encourage you, don't be afraid to jump in. Again, kind of look
at, you could probably plot this out, this little graph on a lot of different topics. And of course,
the whole thing is a fun journey, I'll say, but you know, most people are kind of stuck in this
level. And they're kind of stuck in this sort of, you know, 50, 60% experience. And this is where
like sort of vibe coding lives in this world is people like jump on replit, they jump on lovable,
they throw a couple prompts in and like, hey, I just built an app in a weekend. And there's some
value to it, like amazing that we can do that today. But actually building software and learning
how to build a product that people will pay for and use and how do you get them to come back and
engage in the app? And how do they actually solve your users problems? And how do you market it?
How do you sell it? How do you price it? Like, that's actually what's involved in sort of
building an app or building a product, you know, in 2025. And yes, AI can help you with all those
things. But it is kind of this extra knowledge of going kind of deep on these topics. And of course,
just doing it and kind of learning on the job. So let's help maybe a bit of a ramble, but I wanted
to share this. It's very real this week, because I'm in book learning, studying, learning a lot
to try to get this checkride done behind me. So awesome. We'll switch over,
jump into some discussion here. But thanks for joining us. And we'll see you on the next one.