🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. ---- 📋 THE CHALLENGE You are the client this week. No fictional Marcus. No fictional Sarah. No fictional Devon. Pick a real problem in your own life or work. Build the folder-based specialist you wish you had. This is the capstone of Month 2. The challenge flips. Instead of building for someone else, you write your own brief and solve it for yourself. ---- 🎯 THE TWIST The hard part isn't building. The hard part is scoping. Picking the right problem is harder than solving the wrong one. Most people pick problems that are too small or too vague. The skill this week is treating yourself like a real client. Be specific about what's broken. Be specific about what you need. Don't pick "I want to be more productive." Pick "I waste two hours every Sunday night writing the same kind of LinkedIn carousel posts and I need a folder that handles 80% of the draft work so I can focus on the hook and the visuals." That's a real brief. Specific problem. Specific scope. Specific desired output. ---- 🗂️ TWO DELIVERABLES THIS WEEK This is the only week with two pieces: 1️⃣ Your own client brief. 250 words or less. Describe the problem you're solving for yourself. Treat yourself like a real client. What's broken? What have you already tried? What do you need? 2️⃣ The folder system that solves it. Same structure as every week: - 📄 identity.md - 📐 rules.md - 💬 examples.md - 📚 reference/ - 📖 README.md Your brief lives at the top of the repo as brief.md so judges can read it before they look at the folder. ---- 🔥 THE ANGLE THIS WEEK Anyone can follow a brief. Writing your own, then solving it, then shipping it as a usable folder is a portfolio piece that demonstrates judgment, not just execution. This is the skill that separates "AI hobbyist" from "AI builder." Anyone can prompt their way through a problem someone else handed them. Scoping a problem, designing the solution, and shipping it as a system is what real work looks like. 💪

Evidently 35 to 45 year olds can't adjust and a self proclaimed Harvard Business School graduate just said so. Lamenting the firing of people he's known and loved for many years, while at the same time says he's hiring, just said age plays a role in people's ability to adjust to new ways of working. That's the read on the surface of this guy, but what is the real problem he's facing? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matt-graham-nocode_ai-is-making-some-of-my-employees-obsolete-share-7475533300959477760-UE3Q/?highlightedUpdateUrn=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7475533302351732736&origin=SOCIAL_SHARE&utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAC2KABGgDyj7_CORV0TYkn0dSmOMRHNmo

***A note before you read: this post talks about losing a parent to drug overdose, addiction, and some of the harder parts of growing up through that. If any of this hits close to home, take care of yourself first.*** This is personal, not ai related but feel its important to share. Both @Matthew Creamer and I lost our fathers to drug overdoses. I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because it's the kind of thing that rewires your entire life and I think some of you need to hear that the people building this thing with you know what it feels like to start from somewhere broken. My dad was a good man. I need you to know that before anything else. He was loving, he was present, he was the kind of father who wanted his son to never have to grind through the kind of work he did. He spent his life in construction, the kind that wears your body down year after year, and he always told me he wanted something different for me. He wanted to retire the whole family one day. He wanted to leave a mark on the world and he wanted me to do the same. He just had his demons, and one night when I was 15 they took him from me. A month after my birthday so I was still basically 14 years old and I found him on the couch and that was it. Everything after that moment I had to figure out on my own. I learned how to trim my beard without him standing behind me in the mirror. I learned how to haggle with taxi drivers in countries he never got to see. I broke my heart for the first time and had nobody to call who could tell me what that kind of pain actually means when you're young and don't know who you are yet. I fell into addiction myself somehow escaped after a lot of battles. I joined the Marine Corps and that brought its own tragedies, its own weight. I climbed the tallest mountain in Europe. I walked across the grand sands of the Middle East. I have tasted war and peace, depression and anger, and so much more that I am still learning how to carry.

@Ari Evergreen THIS!!!!!! https://www.aris-space.com/documents/workflows/empower-claude-sessions-as-auditions =EVERYTHING!!!!! ❤️🙏

🎯 WE READ ALL OF YOUR RESPONSES. HERE'S WHAT'S NEXT (AND A BIG ASK) A couple weeks ago we asked you what you wanted Clief Notes to become. You showed up. You wrote real, thoughtful answers, some of you wrote essays. We read every single one. Twice. So before anything else: thank you. This post is us answering you. 💬 YOU TOLD US. HERE'S WHAT WE'RE BUILDING. You said you want a clearer path from learning ICM to actually getting paid for it. → It's coming. A real learning-to-earning track, plus a talent platform we're building to connect you with people who want to hire what you can do. Heads up: the talent platform will be Premium and VIP only, one more reason to lock in below. You said competitions without feedback don't help you grow. → Fixed. Going forward, every single entrant gets tailored feedback on their build, not just the winner. We're moving to two competitions a month so we can do it right. And both monthly winners get a 30-minute call with me. You said the best builds get buried in the feed. → We're building a tagged library so you can actually find "ICM setups for solo operators" or "small team, non-coder" instead of scrolling for an hour. You said you couldn't map all the pieces, Skool, Discord, the Lyceum, ICM, what each tier unlocks. → A single orientation page is on the way. One place that breaks all of it down so nobody's lost. You said you want to connect with each other. → We hear you. Meetups, pairing, and a recorded "After Tea" hangout are on the table. South Florida alone has over 1,000 of you. Let's use that. You said we've felt spread thin. → The most honest one. You're right. We're bringing on real help to run the day-to-day so the community gets consistency, and so Matt and I can keep building the things above instead of dropping balls. You called it, and we're fixing it. 📍 QUICK NOTE ON ICM: a few of you asked for "ICM with Copilot" or "ICM with n8n, Sheets, GoHighLevel." Good news, ICM already works with any model and feeds straight into the tools you're using. It's the structure underneath all of them, not a separate thing you have to relearn per tool. If that's not landing for you, that's on us to make clearer, and we will.