A growing number of school districts are banning A.I. tools like ChatGPT in an effort to prevent students from cheating, requiring them to produce original thought and actually do the work. I agree. After all, do you want the doc or the lawyer who got a passing grade thanks to A.I.?
Recently a casual acquaintance who knows I’m in “tech” and runs a marketing firm excitedly told me he got ChatGPT to write his business plan for a moneymaking idea that he KNOWS is going to be “huge” for engaging and developing fans on social media and that’s never been done before.
Even if the idea had a shot (and it doesn’t), he’s certainly going to be the death of it. For starters, he couldn’t articulate exactly WHO would want to buy this service, much less why they would buy it. He also has never done this before (it’s just in the idea phase). When I asked how this venture makes money and what his strategy was for pricing, he quickly revealed he has no grasp on reality, how money works or the concept of COGs, margin or CAC (customer acquisition cost).
I suggested he ask ChatGPT how to live off a Walmart greeter’s salary, because that’s where he was headed. Yeah, hurtful, but like Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank, someone’s gotta tell people the truth that their idea sucks and that they aren’t the right person to be running it so they avoid burning through all their savings and life on a failing idea. Besides, he asked.
More to my point: people are in a frenzied, mindless lust over any type of “easy button” they can find that will help them avoid doing any real work or develop any skill. Do they REALLY want to become like the people from the movie WALL-E, where they’re kept severely overweight, weak, uninformed and grossly dependent on the big corporation Buy n Large that does everything for them, no exertion or thinking required? If you haven’t seen the movie, watch it. It’s where a large portion of the planet eagerly wants us to move toward.
What this dufus, and many like him, don’t understand is that when you have no skills and you lose your ability to reason and think because you’re constantly skipping the work, you become useless to the marketplace – and useless to the marketplace equals low pay or NO pay. I pointed out to him that the purpose of writing a business plan is NOT to have a business plan, but to THINK THROUGH the tough questions and develop your strategy. If ChatGPT can do that, it’s just robbed you of developing that skill.
Like I tell my kids about math, a subject they both dislike: the value is in learning HOW to work through the problem. You don’t have to like it, but you do need to learn that skill of organized thought and how to work through a challenging equation to come up with the right answer. Yes, you could google it or grab a calculator, but then you lose the mental exercise, which IS the point.
A better question for ChatGPT: What are the top 10 business books I need to read on how to write a business plan? At least THEN my acquaintance would have had a shot at success. Of course, that’s too much work and would probably eat into his Netflix watching.
This is why so many people fail at business. Because 99% of the business owners out there desperately, eagerly, repeatedly and foolishly seek simple solutions to complex problems.
They don’t want 10 good strategies to get a new customer. They want ONE that is easy to implement and costs nothing to execute. They don’t want to be handed a complex sales process for closing the maximum number of deals at the highest possible margins. They want a simple 3-step process – and, in the tech industry, would prefer it’s a piece of software they can use that will do all the heavy lifting of making an argument as to why the prospect needs them, builds the value and overcomes all objections.
They don’t want to do the work of finding, interviewing, training and managing a sales rep. They want to hire a company that can just deliver a cheap, self-managing, pretrained human to book appointments for them. Send check. Leads show up. EASY!
Now, if you’re on the SELLING side of that equation, you’re 100% correct in making an easy-button promise. If you’re on the BUYING end of the deal, you want to be smart enough to realize that nothing that easy is that good. Put simply, SELL easy buttons but BEWARE of anyone or anything promising them. Just look at the richest people in the world and ask yourself, did they get there by asking ChatGPT to write their business plan or do their marketing or hire and lead their team?
The MAJORITY always wants easy, which is exactly why you know it’s the wrong approach. The MAJORITY is broke. Struggling. Clueless. Unhappy and frustrated with every aspect of their lives. If you don’t want to be there, DO THE WORK.
