The Undeniable Leader with Rob Cressy

Goodbye AI Overwhelm: How I Used Claude To Create Clarity

• Rob Cressy

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0:00 | 21:48

AI overwhelm is real and it's not going away. In this episode of The Undeniable Leader, Rob Cressy shares how he's overcoming AI FOMO using Claude, breaks down why capacity is the real bottleneck behind every new tool drop like Opus 4.7 and Claude Design, and walks through how you can turn this from a problem into the biggest competitive advantage of the decade.

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Before we get to today's show, the best version of your AI experience starts with one thing: making it yours. I built a free playbook called the Unlimited Method that walks you through exactly how to personalize your AI so it thinks like you, creates like you, and sounds like you. It's at robcresy.com backslash AI playbook. Go get it now for the show. If you feel like your brain is melting because there's a new AI tool drop every four hours, stop. This is not a technology problem. This is an AI capacity problem. And I noticed this happening to me this past weekend when Claude Design dropped and Opus 4.7 dropped, and there's a new slew of plugins and skills and tools and all of this stuff right there. And it can feel overwhelming, and I get why people feel like they're being left behind or they just can't keep up with AI. And what I want to do is offer up a perspective and a solution so that we can throw AI FOMO in the trash and get clear on how we can build a strategy moving forward so that when inevitably more AI tools come and are released, it's no problem for you because you've got complete clarity on how you are handling this. And the way that I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna share my screen of how I used Claude to help me work through this for myself. And in the process, there are lessons for both of us here for how we can remove the overwhelm and live in the land of clarity. So let's start right here, and you're seeing legitimately what I did. So I had an insight. So uh Opus 4.7 dropped, and at the same time, like a day later, Claude Design dropped. And I started to see in my Twitter feed the for you. It's like, oh, look, here's how we're using hyperframe to design websites and all of this stuff. And it dawned on me, despite being the person who gets all of this, who uses AI on a high level on an everyday basis, I understand all of it there. It dawned on me that I can see where it can be hard for other people because this isn't just a one new tool. This is like a whole department that if you are taking on all that is possible in the world of AI just through the lens of one person executing all of it, I can see where it can be overwhelming because you could sit there and say, where in the world am I gonna create the time to learn how to use claw design in Opus 4.7 when I haven't even done some of the other stuff in the world of AI before. So now somehow we have this element of scarcity or that I'm not doing enough because of all the potential that's out there. So one of the things that I spoke out there is I realized that one of the problems is that it takes a team of people to do it all. And yes, AI is accessible, that anyone can do it. You can vibe code any app that you want, but there's a difference between learning in depth and being good and just seeing shiny objects out there. Because one of the terms that is so alive in me right now, especially with my clients, is discernment. It is a major skill in the world of AI. But I'm seeing this as a slightly different take on this from discernment because um right now we have a restraint around our capacity. There's only so much that we can do, and AI can build a one-person company, but at the same time, with all these shiny objects, where in the world does this live? What does this deal with our mindset? And what is the actual cost this is taking on with me or us? So I asked Claude this to unpack it for me, and what it really circled around is the capacity constraint. And this is something you never hear in the world of AI because everything is new, best, shiny. Drop everything, the world has just changed without realizing that that is typically an AI influencer who is sitting there being like, hey, I'm there on top of every single tool drop. This is my deep dive. That does not mean that they are a practitioner or a business owner who is flipping that around into clients. So some of the things that I see here that I really like is this one here. The shift you're naming is that AI collapsed the cost of doing, but didn't collapse the cost of choosing. So this is where the word discernment comes in there because with all these new tool releases right there, you see what's possible. Wow, all of these choices. And if I'm not doing one, man, was this a thing that could have unlocked the next level for my brand or my marketing, or should I be using Canva, or should I be using Claude Design? And how does all of this come in here, right? You have marketing, design, engineering, research. That the tools right now they're free or they're cheap, but there's a learning curve, there is taste, and then there's orchestration for how you're doing this as a business owner or as a leader. And it says right here, the old bottleneck was labor, right? I don't even know how in the world to do this. And I sit here and I think about back in the day, I taught myself how to use Photoshop 30 minutes at a time for three months, all because I wanted to create a thumbnail for the blog post that I was creating in the world of sports. Now that is legitimately done in 30 seconds. Now it says the new bottleneck is attention and judgment. Yes, one person can technically do it all. There's a person who created a$1.8 billion company with two employees in AI. But being that one person, you really have to understand how to choose what not to do. So there's a difference right here in terms of what's possible and how you're doing this. So there's three things here that it says is compounding in this. Number one, every new release resets the learning curve. So you learn Canva, and then it's like, hey, here comes Claude Design, and you're like, what is Claude Design? Oh my god, look at all these use cases. How in the world is everybody doing this? And then here comes AI video, it's breaking the internet, and then you're like, wow, have I been really doing anything with my YouTube right now? And then here's a brand new model. Should I be using Chat GPT Codex, or am I using the newest thing that Claude has out there? And this is just completely overwhelming everybody, andor creating AI FOMO. And then we also have here orchestration is a distinct skill from usage. So knowing how to prompt Claude is table stakes, right? Everybody can do that right now, but knowing what an agent does, when to hand it off, how to automate versus what do I keep human, what to wire through your actual business, this is the CEO level stuff, and this is the stuff that the market does not tell you. They'll say this is how you can create a website with Claude Design, but it does not have CEO level thinking inside of this. And this is the huge separator in the world right now. And I want to encourage you, and the reason that I'm sharing this is because I felt um something coming up for me in terms of all of these tools. And yes, I'm excited to go learn Claude Design, but at the same time, I realized wait a second, there's a capacity problem for me. I can only imagine what the capacity problem is like for everybody else. So it says here the capacity constraint isn't ours, it's working memory. How many live systems can one human hold in their head and maintain? I call this open tabs in your mind. The number is small, probably five to seven active builds. But then you're like, oh my God, what about this? And what about this? And what about this? So this is where the challenge and the problem is, and using Claude was my answer to the solution for how I'm overcoming this. But then here's the thing that opened up a brand new door for me. Claude says, here's where I'd push back at you gently. You're framing this as a problem, but it's also a moat. The people who develop discernment, taste, and orchestration capacity in the next 18 months become irreplaceable. Everybody else becomes a tool operator. The actual leverage point is exactly what I'm coaching right there. So I asked it, hey, can you explain this a little bit more for you for me when you say um I'm framing it as a problem, which I am, but you're saying that it's a moat. So really it's saying there's an opportunity in here for us right now, in the way that this is a problem. Because here's the thing if I feel like it's a problem having done this for three and a half years every single day, it surely is a problem for everybody else because um we all feel the same thing. And I always say that with a smile on my face. Whatever you're feeling and experiencing in your business as it relates to AI, guess what? I feel the same thing. I'm just sharing my thought process for how I'm overcoming it, and then how we're actually turning this into a skill that serves us moving forward because very few people are going to go to a level of depth like this. So here we go. The overwhelm is real, but there's a gap between AI is accessible and AI is well orchestrated within my business. And it says this is the big arbitrage opportunity of the decade, and it's widening, not closing with every new release. So think about this. Moving forward, there's gonna be infinite amounts of new tools, new releases, things for you to learn. So it would serve all of us right now to get on the same page in terms of all right, what is your strategy when the next level Claude design or Claude video comes out or Claude for marketing? And of course, you can go into Claude Co-work and they've got this list of 12 skills for everything you can do for your business. Cool, that's the menu. But I want you to start thinking about this like a practitioner, somebody who's very pragmatic about the ways that they are using this to grow their business. One of the things that I truly believe in having a human first perspective in the world of AI is coming from an inside out perspective, not outside in. And what I mean by this is so often you'll see here's our 250 skill prompt pack. And it's like, wow, look at all these possibilities. I'm overwhelmed. I don't even know where to start. How in the world am I gonna create all the time to integrate this into my business? Versus the way that I do this is from an inside out perspective, where I am actively doing things for my business and growing them. And then from there, that's where I'm creating the tools or the skills. And I think the best example for me is the way that I'm using Claude skills right now, and I'll even show you briefly while we do a little detour here of how in the world um I am doing this because it's gonna be very reflective of what I'm teaching right here is my skills that I create are created in real time, oftentimes with my clients, or as the way that I'm building my business. So, for example, right here, the first one I have is what I call the Wayne Gretzky Pain Finder. And I was on a client call, and we were talking about man, imagine if we had the ability to see the pain of inaction or not doing something in the world of AI three months, six months, or 12 months down the road. And our ability to take a transcript, use this skill, and then it'll be like, hey, if you don't do this thing, here's the pain that you might not see that's gonna happen three months, six months, and 12 months from now. And in my mind, I was like, oh, this is just like Wayne Gretzky, who said, skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is right now. So I was like, great, let's call this the Wayne Gretzky Pain Finder, the future pain diagnostic engine. And this is something that we legitimately built in real time because of what we were experiencing around how we wanted to identify the pain for ourselves and our clients so that we could create a better solution for them. So, this is a perfect example of an inside out perspective, not outside in, where I can tell you the exact story for this, how it applies to my business, how it applies to my clients. Take that same mindset as it relates to AI overwhelm or this AI capacity constraint that we are feeling with tools. So, what we have down here is this is a judgment skill and judgment compounds. This is something that can't be vibe coded, you can't download it in a weekend. It takes reps and scars and enough lived experience to know what breaks in production. So, this is where you're gonna want to be a practitioner here, to where you're like, all right, what am I doing in my business? What is the best tool for this for me right now and go from there? Because I've talked many times that I don't particularly care about product upgrades. Oh my god, here comes Opus 4.7 when we're on 4.6. I get it, but it's misplaced focus for me because I want to be tool agnostic in the way that I'm leveraging AI. Hey, what is the vision of what I have for my business? What are the projects that I'm working on here now? And then how in the world are we going to make all of this happen? So the reason this becomes a moat is because it's way easier to tell yourself that I'm just so overwhelmed by everything or I can't keep up with the rate of innovation with AI. Throw that in the trash. You're completely in control, you're only one prompt away from Claude of saying, hey, here's what I'm feeling. Let's reverse engineer this to create the clarity that I am looking for there. So the last thing here that I'm gonna jam on is now we're gonna go towards the future because it's like, okay, I understand this, but how does this apply to the world of agentic AI? So I say, okay, great, now let's take this forward towards agentic AI, where it is AI doing the tasks for us, or at least that's the promise sold, whether having to build that ourselves or getting plugged into an agentic platform, right? So I'm taking the vision of what I believe is going to happen in the future because so many people are gonna be like, well, Rob, I have no background in agentic AI. Me either. But that doesn't mean I can't start saying what this might look like in the future. Either I'm gonna create it or somebody else's, and we're gonna plug ourselves into that thing. So it's like, okay, that's reality here. How's all of this gonna come into play here? Because agentic feels like a category leap. This isn't just like prompting, this is now digital labor doing stuff. So once again, I feel like this is a thing to unpack, especially as more AI tools and upgrades will happen when agentic is being rolled out. So now we're gonna be on turbo mode, right? So now we've got tools everywhere, and then it's like, by the way, do you want digital labor doing this stuff for you? And you're gonna go, whoa, I wasn't even using Claude Design yet. I just started switching over from Chat GPT to Claude. And now you're telling me I need to use agentic AI, which I don't understand anything about. Oh, welcome to the world, right? So here we go. Here's the shift. Up until now, AI has been a co-pilot. You sit down, you prompt, it produces, you review, you ship. The human is the loop on every move. The capacity constraint is your attention during the work. And of course, no one is gonna sit there and be like, you know what the big problem is? Your attention is scattered. But you know the true reality that all of us feel every single day, myself included? We got a million tabs open in our mind right now, and I can't keep track of any of them. And that is only going to accelerate in the next 10 years, which is why we're having this conversation right now. So agentic AI moves the human out of the loop during execution and into the loop around execution. So we're not prompting anymore, we're designing. And this is why so many of us have moved over to Claude, because Claude is building and designing. Chad GBT is more of a chatbot. So with this in agentic AI, we're gonna set goals, we're gonna set guardrails, we're gonna have triggers. Hey, when this thing happens, this thing happens. We're gonna have handoffs once that thing happens, then do this, and then we're gonna create quality gates. It's like, hey, this is what the best version of this looks like. The agent runs, you check the outputs, not the steps. And one of the phrases I want you to write down and use for the next decade of your business in AI validate and verify. With agentic AI, do not assume anything works. You need to validate and verify. And of course, this thing then says this is a completely different skill set. And most people right now are underestimating how different. So three things are gonna happen when AI agents actually land. The cost of doing is gonna get to near zero, but the cost of specifying correctly goes way up. If you brief an agent wrong, it confidently executes in the wrong thing at scale, right? This is why discernment, once again, is such a big thing, and this is why you want to have that systems mindset there. So the stakes of clarity right here go up 10x because the more clear you are, the better your data, the more an AI agent can do something. It's why I built out the gold vault in Notion, my single source of truth. If you're sitting here and your digital garden is messy, you got stuff in Google Drive and Dropbox and on your phone and in your head and not written down, that's gonna be the massive hole in your boat. Go to RobCressy.com backslash gold vault. It will change the next decade of your business. The next thing here, trust becomes the new bottleneck, not capability. Trust. You can't hand off to an agent something that you have not validated, right? So having this murky idea of what to do next does not allow digital labor to work for you. This is why, once again, we want to be crystal clear on our thinking, right? And this is not what most people teach, but I'm telling you from experience, having done this for 1200 straight days, thinking is the name of the game for all of AI. Because I've got no background in this except for being all in on this for three and a half years. And then the last thing right here is orchestration moves from which tool do I use to which agent owns what and how do they talk to each other. That's a completely different altitude of thinking, and it's closer to being the GM of a sports team than it is a solo operator because each agent will have its own role, scope, handoff point, and the human becomes the coach or the orchestrator, not just the player. So I wanted to share this perspective with you for a few reasons. Number one, to show you how I actually coach myself to overcome the own problems that I have around AI capacity and AI FOMO, all in the name of creating clarity of thinking and execution in my business, and you can too. Because if you can throw away for the rest of your life that you're never overwhelmed by AI, you never feel behind, and you never sit there being like, oh my God, look at all these things that people are doing. Understand that just because somebody posts something does not mean that they are a practitioner and doing this in their business, because this is a full spectrum loop. The name of the game is how do I turn a dollar into a dollar fifty? How am I leveraging AI to grow my business? And for you and I, we are doing so in a heart-first, human-first perspective that leads with our vision, our values, and our goals. Because we want to go from being in that consumer mindset to being in a producer mindset. Hey, how are the tools that we are using in AI serving us? It's not just about consuming all of what's possible. Nah, give me those things that I'm actually doing in real time from that inside out perspective. That way, you're not sitting there being like, oh, I just gotta go and find the next big thing. You're sitting there and creating the next big version of yourself and your business in this clarity of thinking and clarity of systems and process. This is the driver of the next level, especially as agentic AI gets here. So I would love to hear from you. Number one, are you feeling and experiencing everything that I am right now with AI in terms of the tool drops and wow, just so much going on right there? And then number two, what's that gift you're gonna give yourself in the name of clarity? And hit me up at Rob Cressy on Instagram, on LinkedIn. I want to be a champion for you and all of this. Help you go from good to great with AI. Sending tons of love and good vibes away is having a rest of the day.