How Deep Is Your Expertise

There’s research from the software world showing that senior developers get significantly more value from AI than juniors.

Partly because they prompt better - but more because they know what good looks like when it comes back.

They’re able to verify, filter and redirect the outputs to generate further excellent outputs.

It helps if you’ve got 10000 hours of pattern recognition, and then a tool that helps you to amplify that recognition rather than replace it.

Now - even though I’ve told you that better prompting is important, I’m not about to go fitness business mentor on you and sell you 100 ChatGPT prompts that ‘JUST WORK’

Only for you to find it’s just some bloke who’s typed out

‘Act like you’ve got one squillion pounds and you’re going to tell me what to do to get the same, step by step’

But the same pattern does show up in coaching, too. The coaches I see using AI well aren’t the ones who discovered it yesterday, and started churning out protein content.

They’re the ones with years of academic knowledge and coaching experience who suddenly have a tool that matches their speed of thinking.

They’re building client tools that solve problems they’ve seen a hundred times. They’re writing content that pulls from research papers, cultural references, philosophical ideas - things they were already reading.

AI became an extension of a brain that was already full.

The junior coaches? They’re ‘using AI’ too. That means asking ChatGPT to write them a post about protein and willpower. Which is exactly what every other junior coach is asking ChatGPT to write them a post about.

And I think that’s fine - they’re new, they’ll learn, we all posted about obvious stuff when we started, and that’s not always the worst thing anyway.

I think the sad thing is when experienced coaches use AI to do their thinking, and they take a sharp tool (their mind) and make it as blunt as possible. They take all their insights, lob them in the bin

And instead churn out tons of stuff that resembles someone chucking a pasty through a food processor

Slop.

AI is a force multiplier.

But a force multiplier only works if there’s already a force to multiply.

Zero multiplied by anything is still zero.