From 0 to 5K: The Complete Simplified Guide to Getting Going with AI

A step-by-step system for turning AI into your daily partner—from spite-driven development to workflows that make everything from writing to analysis WAY easier. Aimed at beginners this time!

A year ago, I sat in front of ChatGPT for two hours trying to write a high-value email where the wording really mattered. Nothing worked. Each prompt produced results worse than the last. ChatGPT could not grok my style. I finally gave up and wrote it myself in 20 minutes—and that moment of frustration taught me everything about why most of us struggle with AI.

AI is a tough technology to learn. It requires a high degree of engagement to learn well, but without clear direction that engagement tends to be frustrating and low-value. That’s why I wrote this guide.

My goal is for you to go from curiosity to daily utility—even if you're skeptical, overwhelmed, or burned out. Because if you have to wait until things are going well to use AI, you’re gonna be waiting awhile! (checks stocks, winces)

It’s not about intelligence! I've spent the last year watching really smart people struggle with AI in exactly the same way I did that day: trying ChatGPT once or twice, getting mediocre results, and either giving up or settling into a fairly low value usage pattern (“I use CoPilot to sometimes summarize really long customer emails, but other than that not much—and it still hallucinates”).

In some ways, using ChatGPT or CoPilot or Claude badly is worse than not using it at all! It’s so demoralizing—this was supposed to be an AI revolution and the thing can’t even do my email drafting correctly. I’ve been that person.

Here's what I've learned: The problem isn't you. And it's not even really the AI.

The problem is that we're missing the manual for going from "I know I should use this" to "this is actually making my life better."

Over the last couple of years, I've watched thousands of people try to build this habit. I've coached teams through it. I've failed at it myself more times than I can count. And after all that, I've finally figured out what actually works—not just in theory, but in practice, for real people with real jobs and real resistance to change.

This isn't just another AI guide. This is the guide I wish I'd had two years ago: concrete, human, and focused on that crucial gap between knowing AI matters and making it work for you.

Unfortunately (for me), it took a couple of years of blood, sweat, and tears to get this built in a way I feel good about.

Fortunately (for you) I finally think I have it. A guide that gets you from undirected individual experimentation to very clear wins, and these days that’s a career essential.

"Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify."
— Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, today (full essay here, and it’s great).

That quote and the whole essay land hard. Because what does that actually mean for you, on a Tuesday afternoon, with Slack notifications piling up and a presentation you haven't started yet? What does it mean when you know you should but you don’t have time?

That’s why I finally pulled all my notes together over the last couple of years and wrote this. This isn’t just a pretty manual, this is a battle log. I fought for this knowledge. AI isn’t easy to learn because everything we talk about runs through an innocent-looking little chatbot. Unlike most software, it’s not intuitively obvious what all it can do.

That’s what this manual is for, and yes it comes with like four separate toolkits as well because we’re completists around here!