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- The Gods Must Be Crazy
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
A Coke Bottle
The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1984 film about a remote African tribe whose world is disrupted by a simple glass Coke bottle dropped from an airplane. Believing it to be a gift from the gods, they find endless uses for it—until envy and conflict break out. The protagonist, Xi, sets out to return it and restore peace to his tribe.
Our moment with AI feels similar. We’ve been handed a powerful, strange new tool with seemingly endless uses. But unlike the Coke bottle, AI is infinite. The challenge isn’t scarcity—it’s abundance.
So how do we use it meaningfully to improve our productivity?
Rather than sharing a list of specific use cases, I want to focus on five common types of problems where AI can help.
If you're a freelancer, founder, business owner, or creative, these categories likely apply to you.
Complete the survey at the end and you'll receive a free AI Guide to Productivity with detailed examples and prompts for each category.
Prompts
“Intelligence is the ability to ask better questions.”
Before jumping into the problem categories, a brief word on the importance of prompting. The more an AI understands your problem, the better its answer.
AI is a prediction machine. The quality of its output depends on the quality of your prompt.
Try this: what's the first word that comes to mind after "Old ______"?
Most say "man" or "woman".
But if I say "Old MacDonald ______," nearly everyone responds with "had".
The difference? More context leads to a more refined answer.
What if instead of adding an additional word, I included a role: "You're a children's book author”. Now complete: Old ______," nearly everyone responds with “McDonald”.
Same base prompt, better framing, smarter output. That’s the essence of prompting and I provide more detail on how to best structure prompts in the free pdf.
Problems
Knowledge Compression
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
How often do you read the terms and conditions before clicking “accept”? Probably never. They’re full of noise— legal jargon, references, and definitions. AI is great at cutting through that noise.
As a Fractional CFO, I have to worry about details and AI helps tremendously. I upload the file and prompt it to summarize key findings and important sections including page numbers. I will also ask it to identify unusual terms and conditions.
In this way, the AI has me focus on the important sections FIRST while providing a document map for easy navigation.
Need to become knowledgable in a subject? The same approach applies.
For example, If you’re traveling to a new country soon, you want the language essentials. If you plan to study it for a year, you want the foundations. The same source material—very different compression.
I purposefully titled this section “Knowledge Compression” and not “Summarization”. A summary reduces everything. But with AI, you can direct the compression based on your goal and context.
Divergent Thinking
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
Xi and his fellow tribesman would have done well in the famous interview question, “How many different ways can you use a brick?” The question is meant to evaluate a component of creativity known as divergent thinking (brain-storming). Specifically, evaluators use the question to test the following aspects of divergent thinking:
Fluency - how many ideas you generate
Flexibility - variety of idea types
Originality - how uncommon the ideas
Elaboration - level of detail in ideas
Like other forms of intelligence, our ability to think divergently falls on a spectrum with different sub-attributes being stronger than others. AI can fill in the gaps.
You may come up with 100 ways to use a brick but if they all involve building a structure, your fluency might be high but your flexibility low.
Or if you’re writing a story, maybe you succeed in both fluency and flexibility but need help elaborating on details.
Think about situations in your venture or business where divergent thinking is necessary.
These could include brainstorming potential business names, social media posts, product ideas, customer avatars, etc.
The key is to not only ask AI to make the list but guide it using the four aspects of divergent thinking listed above.
AI isn’t the end of creativity. However, a crucial step in the creative process, divergent thinking can be enhanced with AI.
Planning
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
All plans fail—at least a little.
Several years ago, I trained for an Ironman 70.3: a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 13.1-mile run.
I barely had the 8–10 weekly hours recommended just to finish, so consistency became everything. I built a 10-month training plan with one primary and two backup workouts each day to make sure I never missed a session. It was a successful plan because I realized the vulnerabilities and included contingencies.
What took me a few weeks, AI can do in minutes. Whether you upload an existing plan or ask AI to help build one, prompt it with questions like:
What’s the critical path?
Where are the bottlenecks?
Where are there vulnerabilities?
How can I de-risk this?
The smartest planners don’t just ask what could work—they ask what could go wrong. AI helps you do both.
Decision Support
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
My first startup was a video game company. We had physical toys associated with licensed characters in one of our games. One question we struggled with was how many game characters should be made into toys prior to launch?
We had to consider the potential popularity of the characters, difficulty in manufacturing, our own capital constraints, the terms and conditions of the manufacturer and numerous other factors.
The short story is we ordered way too many. We learned an expensive lesson but one we would have at least minimized with the help of AI.
With AI, we could’ve modeled different scenarios, stress-tested our assumptions, and surfaced the trade-offs we missed—before we tied up our cash in plastic we couldn’t sell.
Convergent Thinking
“A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.”
Once the game launched, we finally had real data to guide our toy production decisions. The challenge wasn’t a lack of information—it was the opposite.
We had to weigh dozens of variables: how often each character was played, by which demographics, and how behavior changed over time. Turning that firehose of data into a clear decision was difficult.
You likely face similar problems where data for your decision exists, but winnowing it down to clear action steps is time consuming or difficult. Such problems is where AI can help you more easily turn data into decisions.
The Next Step
If you are a free subscriber and would like to explore solving these classes of problems with AI more deeply, complete the following survey and you will receive an email with a link to download the AI Guide to Productivity.
The pdf includes a template for how to write effective prompts as well as example prompts and use cases for each problem class.
My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future.
Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.