If you want to guarantee you fail in AI and automation: Keep consuming content. Keep watching YouTube videos. Keep bookmarking new tools. Just don't build. Here are the 4 behaviors that are guaranteeing your failure in the AI & automation space: 1. Stay on the sidelines. Tell yourself you're "getting ready." Meanwhile, someone else ships messy. Josh Pigford saw a tweet about an AI idea, publicly said "I'm building this," shipped a rough MVP in a weekend, turned it into paying users, and exited for around $15k. It wasn't polished. It just existed. Observers don't get leverage. Builders do. If you never attach your name to something real, you never get feedback, users, or momentum. --- 2. Chase every new, shiny tool. The moment a new model drops, you abandon what you were learning. A 2025 breakdown on AI startups warned that founders chasing every shiny tool end up scattered, burned out, and shallow. The ones actually growing picked a tiny stack and mastered it deeply against specific goals. Mastery compounds. Hype resets. If you're chasing the newest tool like everyone else, you're constantly starting from zero. --- 3. Avoid choosing a niche. Stay vague. Be "into AI." Be "doing automation." Meanwhile, AI agencies charging $2-3k per client per month aren't generalists. They're solving specific problems for specific clients. They're "AI marketing for med spas." They're "AI video systems for B2B SaaS." Once they picked a lane, offers got clearer, referrals got warmer, and revenue got predictable. Generalists feel safe. Specialists get paid. --- 4. Confuse motion with progress. Build private projects. Refine invisible systems. Take more courses. A founder recently grew from $10k to $18.5k MRR in 90 days—not by learning more tools, but by DMing real prospects, shipping AI products clients could touch, and letting those shipped builds become proof. Another builder prototyped a SaaS in a week using AI and used that demo to close clients. They didn't "prepare." They shipped.

Yesterday, I conducted a sales call with a potential client after spending the past week auditing his business (which needs automation BADLY). For me, this would have been my biggest deal yet (a $4,997 system). I created the most beautiful slide deck in Gamma that I rehearsed 7 times. Everything was polished to perfection. When it came time to deliver my pitch, I started strong. I had him nodding, agreeing, and giving positive feedback. Slowly, he started getting quiet, hesitating, and rambling about unrelated concerns. After reflecting on that call, I realized exactly where and why he started getting nervous. So I decided to share these 5 key lessons learned with each of you so you can learn from my mistakes, and increase your chances of closing your next client. (FYI: I wrote these for myself initially, then copied and pasted them into this post.) ——— 🔑 1. When prospects agree with your diagnosis about their problem, take it as a green light to just move on. Don’t continue wasting time trying to get them to understand how bad their situation is. If they agree with your assessment, move on. 🔑 2. When discussing pricing, NEVER suggest reducing the price, even if they balk. ONLY suggest tightening the scope if necessary. When you’re quick to negotiate pricing, you look like you don’t stand by your offer. You can show flexibility without weakening your sell. 🔑 3. It helps to create a slide/diagram (I call it a “Systems Boundary Map”) to illustrate how the solution will fit into their current tool architecture. This helps them understand how the solution will be compatible for their specific business. 🔑 4. Never let the prospect derail the conversation with their concerns (even if it seems unrelated). This is a form of resistance (remember Block’s “Flawless Consulting”). Instead, get them to clearly name the concern in a few words (interrupt if you have to), promise to address it later, and move on. Nothing kills your authority like letting them snatch the mic out of your hand.

TL;DR I built a beautiful, high-converting website for my personal brand using Google Antigravity without a lick of programming knowledge. Check out what I created below 🙂 Anthony's premium website: www.ahunter.ai --- I didn’t pick up Google Anti-Gravity to “build a website.” I picked it up to see what the hype was about. Two weeks later, I had a fully custom, high-converting personal site live. And the only thing that broke during the process was a limiting belief. For years, building something like this would’ve meant one of three things: • Outsourcing to a dev • Spending months learning front-end skills • Letting the idea sit because it felt too heavy This time, it was different. Before I ever touched Anti-Gravity, I started in ChatGPT. I gave it full context: Who I am. What I wanted to build. The aesthetic, tone, and feel I was aiming for. Then I used it as a thinking partner, iterating on the creative direction until the prompt itself was solid. That one refined prompt did about 60% of the work. When I passed it into Anti-Gravity and watched the site come together in real time (animations, layout, structure) it clicked: This is no harder than using ChatGPT. I didn’t write the code. I don’t understand most of the codebase. And it didn’t matter. The rest of the time was just polish: Tightening layout. Refining interactions. Editing photos (taken by my lovely fiancé in her home office) to match the design language. Less than two weeks. Less than $150. No dev team. No front-end expertise. What this shattered for me: • “I need a dev/designer to do this.” • “This will take months.” • “I’m not technical enough.” • “This level of polish is out of reach solo.” What replaced it was simple (and dangerous, in a good way): I’m not limited by skills anymore. I’m truly only limited by my imagination. If you can explain what’s in your head clearly, guide a model, and iterate... you can build. Websites. Dashboards. Internal tools. Brands. Apps.

https://youtu.be/TV1E6YhD0Es

Lately, I've been noticing a pattern worth naming, especially in AI and automation circles. A lot of builders are skipping fundamentals. Not because they don't care, but because tools like Claude Code make it feel unnecessary. Here's the slippery slope: When you jump straight to having AI build workflows, systems, or automations for you, you never actually learn how those systems work. You don't develop systems thinking. And when something breaks, drifts, or needs nuance, you're stuck. That's not leverage. It's fragility disguised as agility. Learning tools like n8n or Zapier isn't really about the tools. It's about training your mind to think in flows, constraints, tradeoffs, and edge cases. That systems thinking is the real asset. The tools just make it visible. The same thing shows up with blind trust in model output. No testing. No human checkpoints. No judgment layered on top. AI is powerful, but it's weak at nuance, context, and intent. Those are human responsibilities. When we remove ourselves from that loop, we don't become more advanced. We become more replaceable. There's also a quieter risk people don't talk about enough. Automating everything means handing over the keys to your kingdom: passwords, APIs, data, workflows, decisions. We just watched what happens when hype outpaces judgment (*cough* Clawdbot *cough*). The people who paused, observed, and exercised restraint proved wise. The people who rushed in gave up leverage they didn't fully understand and needlessly exposed themselves. And then there's the most important part: When you outsource the productive struggle (the planning, the reasoning, the writing, the design), you lose the very process that builds expertise. Skills you don't exercise don't stay neutral. They decay. That's why the real value in this work isn't speed. It's doubling down on what makes us uniquely human: critical thinking, context awareness, judgment, creativity, ethical and security boundaries. Those are the real assets. AI should amplify those things, not replace them.