Derek Johanson is apparently running a launch of CopyHour this week. I say “apparently” because there was some mixup with Derek’s emails, and they only arrived to my inbox today. I opened one this morning to read the following bitter prediction:
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Back in the 1960s, researchers were looking at the productivity improvements computers were about to bring – and sounded the alarm because it looked like humans were soon going to only be working 2 hours a day with the same output.
What would we do with all that free time!? What will happen to the economy!?
Obviously that’s not what happened. Instead of working less, we just started outputting a lot more in the same amount of time.
I have a feeling we’re going through a similar cycle now.
AI is about to replace a lot of the work we’re doing now – not just copywriting, but everything. But, instead of not working, we’re likely just all going to start outputting 10x-100x what we used to because of those advances in AI.
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If you wanna lose money, put your chips on “But this time it’s different!” In other words, the Lindy Effect backs up Derek’s bitter prediction.
We’ve had breakthroughs in labor-saving technology for hundreds of years. At each point, the Powers That Be started worrying, “If people aren’t working, what the hell are we gonna do with them?”
The result was that, with each new labor-saving technology, some way was devised to keep people as busy are before, or busier, while simply making their output 100x greater.
But, and I realize I’m most likely going to shoot myself in the foot here, this time it’s different, at least the way I see it.
It’s not so much because the latest crop of AI is such a powerful labor-saving tool, though that’s certainly a requirement.
Rather, I think it’s because other parts of society have changed from the days of mainframe computers and rotary presses and spinning jennies.
Maybe I’m biased, but I see more and more people working for themselves, or with a range of clients or customers or followers, rather than with one single boss. This makes it more likely that people can work from where they want, as much or as little as they want, rather than 40+ hours, take it or leave it, from our office in downtown Baltimore, exclusively on the employer’s terms.
Or if you want to get more dark, I also think the Powers That Be are fine to let us have our leisure today because they now have other ways of controlling the world that they didn’t have before. That could be monetary, technological, or simply via TikTok propaganda.
All that’s to say, my prediction is that this time it really is different.
We genuinely are entering an era where unprecedented numbers of people free up leisure time for themselves, and work only on things they choose to do, in moderation, rather than obsessively running on the hamster wheel because it’s either run or die.
AI is an inevitable part of this transformation. And you can get started with it today. Which brings me to the offer I am promoting nowadays, ChatGPT Mastery.
I wrote an email about ChatGPT Mastery yesterday that did surprisingly well.
Direct marketing dogma says if something is working, don’t touch it.
So here is my email from yesterday, reprinted word for word, in case you want to automate some of your work and free up some of your time:
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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.
Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:
#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.
The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.
And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.
#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.
I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.
I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.
#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.
But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.
He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.
#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.
Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:
– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)
– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation
– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs
#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.
The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.
If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.
Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).
#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.
I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.
All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.
#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off: