[0:00]All right, folks, this one, episode 35, and we’re going to up the ante. I had done a podcast a while back about the five-minute content plan or something. I don’t remember the exact term, but what I realized was that’s for people that are super efficient and work at a breakneck pace. So instead, I want to give you something today that you can literally use this afternoon because I know you’re busy, and I know that content feels like a grind, and I know most of the quote-unquote content strategy advice out there is you’re built for people with marketing teams. And in fairness, maybe my last post about a five-minute content plan was a little bit more geared towards people like myself who can kind of do every step of the phase, right, just boom, boom, boom. I could have three or four apps loaded and just go from thing to thing to thing in a matter of minutes. And that wasn’t fair. So let’s do this instead. Let’s think of this as the 20-minute content system for a business owner who has real work to do, which should be everybody listening for the most part, except for my dog.

[1:06]I make my dog listen to the podcast every single time it comes out, so I get an extra listener. I have a burner phone just for the dog. She sits there, she stares at it, she eats her treats. She doesn’t seem to be a fan. But, you know, hey, even she could do this in 20 minutes. So here’s what we’re going to do. The problem most people face, you sit down and create content, you stare at a blank screen. And that blank screen wins every damn time because you’re trying to write from nothing. And writing from nothing is brutal as hell. It’s the worst. When you just sit there and go, oh, what am I going to do? Or you go, even if you look up a trending topic or something, it’s tough because people don’t know where to start from. So we’re going to stop starting from nothing. We’re going to start leveraging some tools that are out there. So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to set a 10-minute timer. You’re going to open up a Word doc or a voice memo on your phone. Then you’re going to answer three questions out loud or in writing. What’s the number one mistake you see your clients make?

[2:07]What question do you get asked most often? And finally, what’s something you believed five years ago about your industry that you now know is completely wrong? I don’t want you to edit it. I don’t want you to format it. Just dump it out, raw, messy, and real. Just like, you know, it’s what they call prog mess, right? Prog mess, messy progress. Just drop that into something. When a timer stops, you have your material. You’re now going to take that raw material. And like what we talked about a couple episodes ago, you’re going to drop that raw material into your AI tool, whether it’s your ChatGPT, your Gemini, your Claude. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to ask it to turn that content into LinkedIn posts, into a three-post series even, depending on how much you give it. With each one focused on a single idea from what you submitted, short, punchy, controversial, or conversational, I guess. I’m controversial. More conversational, I guess. Brain fart, you know, boring, controversial. So it kind of makes sense that

[3:10]I would say that instead of conversational. So just short, punchy, going back and forth, getting the person engaged. You spend five minutes now cleaning up the one post that sounds most like you. So out of those three, if there’s one where you’re like, whoa, that is like, that really hit it good. Spend five more minutes now and edit that post. Don’t take it right from the AI. I never take something direct from AI. I mean, I’m a huge believer of AI gets you there, but you have to be the one that drives that run in. So it might load the bases for you, but you still have to be Aaron Judge of the Yankees and go up to the plate and knock those runs in. So that’s you editing. You’re knocking those runs in. That’s your content for today. Go post it. It’s that simple. The content’s done, right? Now you got two other pieces that you can either give more context to, work it a little further. And that one chat, now you’ve turned it to three solid pieces of content, not just slop, not just give me three posts about insurance. You know, for my marketing, no. You’re giving it real question and answer content

[4:14]that it can now use those three questions to build three great posts. And here’s the thing. It’s not about you being coming some amazing content creator, right? This isn’t the plan. it’s about you not being invisible right just like the last episode talking about you know building in secret it’s about not being invisible because your clients are on linkedin right now and they’re looking for somebody who knows what you know so be the person they find why be another just name on a list that they don’t see that likes one of their posts down the road bring the heat bring it like spend the 15 20 minutes you need to get this knocked out today yeah look if you’re efficient you could do this in 10 honestly honestly you could you could i could talk those three answers out loud in five minutes max it’ll be hundreds and hundreds of words in five minutes then have the ai pump it out then another five ten minutes to edit i’m out in 10 15 minutes easy you don’t need a graphic every time just post the text content doesn’t always need

[5:16]a graphic, especially if your graphics are always AI. If your graphics are always shit slop, then you don’t need that every time. Post a graphic when it matters. Take a real picture. Go walk outside with your dog. I’ll take a picture of my same podcast hating dog out in the backyard and I’ll post her. She’s going to be mad at me now that I’m saying this, but it is what it is. She’s not a fan. I can’t help it. It’s a dog. So the riff of the episode is this. Stop starting from nothing. Your expertise is the content. And AI can be the assembly line. So let it manufacture for you from your original IP the base content that you can then go in and edit, right? That’s the end of the story here. It’s what it all comes down to. Let things help you. But let things help you in a smart way where you’re actually giving it content and context. All right, guys, that’s it. 20 minute content system. Yeah, really, man. It’s there. I’m Steve Lichtman. This is unfiltered and unshakable men. Yeah. Have a wonderful day.

[0:01]All right this next episode gang is something that heck i’m i’m probably guilty of more than, anybody right so we’re at episode 34 and we’re gonna get keep it real and this one it might sting a little bit i mean sometimes they do but that’s kind of the point is to say something where you’re like shoot that’s me so you can have that moment where you’re like you know it’s time to change and i’m somebody who’s been there with this right so this is this is gonna be a topic that hits home with me. I’ve been there, done that. And it’s this, you’re building in secret. Think about it. Stop building in secret, really. That’s going to be the title of this episode, probably stop building in secret. That seems to make sense. You know, you’re building in secret. What I mean by that is this, you’re working on the offer. You’re tweaking your website. You’re refining your program and what you deliver. You’re getting everything just perfectly right before you tell anybody. Like you keep it all in. You’re just doing it all. You’re doing all the background work and nobody knows. And I get it.

[1:01]It feels like the responsible thing to do. It feels like the professional thing to do, not to half-ass it, right, with something that’s not finished. It feels safer than putting something out there and having it be imperfect. And look, for me personally, I have that problem. I’m one of those people where I can look at something over and over and over again and just ride that perception of imperfection in my head to not release things. Honestly, it’s why I made the entire F*ck It Switch challenge in my community. The whole reason I built that challenge was a personal challenge to myself to get this done because I have so many ideas, man. And if I just did nothing but content production for the next year, I could be busy every single day. That’s how much I’ve got written down. That’s how much content I’ve created. That’s how many pages of stuff that I’ve written.

[2:04]And we’re not talking about AI stuff. We’re talking about me writing it over decades now. Just content, just stuff, things I do with people. I do keep records of my conversations with folks and the main things I build, the structures I build, so I can have it for reference. Fed all that stuff into the old GPT there, into the old Claude. And man, oh man, it can turn itself into a manifesto. But look, here’s what’s really happening. You’re hiding, right? And every day you stay in build mode and you’re not putting something into the world, you’re paying a price. And it’s not just about missed revenue. It’s also missed feedback, missed momentum and the slow erosion of your own belief that it’s actually going to work. The market doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards presence, consistent, visible, honest presence.

[3:08]If you’re around all the time, you start getting seen. If you’re around once in a blue moon and nobody has a clue when it happens, guess what? Nobody knows you exist. It’s not the worst thing for some people. They have enough referral business and they’re happy with it. But for people that want to put themselves out there in the universe, you actually have to do it. I remember when I launched my first real program, I spent weeks polishing it. I spent three more weeks finding reasons not to announce it. Meanwhile, I got a DM asking if I had anything like that. They didn’t care that it wasn’t perfect. They were just asking, hey, do you have a course like this? And I’m like, yeah, kind of, but it’s not up yet. That’s a struggle a lot of us fall into.

[4:09]We want to do something, we have a passion for something, but when it gets to the brass tacks of putting it out there and letting people react, we get afraid and we turtle up. How stupid is it to hold back because you’re afraid of what some random person on the internet is going to say? Build for you. Build for who you want to help and how you want to help them. Don’t build for critics. What you need to understand is this: you don’t need a perfect offer, a perfect website, a perfect solution to start the conversation. You need a real one. As long as what you’re building is legit, that’s all that matters. Today we’re on the Execute side of RISE. I want you to tell one person today what you’ve been building.

[5:09]Not to sell them. Just say it out loud. I’ve been doing a lot with Claude Code — coding a tool using their agentic coding features mixed with my own abilities. I’ve completely re-fallen in love with technology and coding after about 15 years of walking away from it. I had a daughter who was born and I wanted to spend time with her and not late nights at the CLI hacking away. But I’m obsessed again, and it’s a better time in life to be obsessed with this technology. So look, today: tell one person what you’re building. Don’t sell them, just say it out loud. Because once you say it out loud to another human being, it stops being an idea and it becomes something real.

[6:11]Now you have to wonder, if that person sees you again, are they going to say, hey, Steve, how’s Project X working out? Oh, it’s still in my mind. Or, oh yeah, it’s live now, here’s a link. That’s what I wanted to tell you today. Stop building in secret. The world can’t hire what they can’t see. The world can’t benefit from what they don’t hear. You can’t reach people if they don’t know you’re out there. You have to put yourself out there, no matter how scary it is. Today’s riff: The market doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards presence. Write it in the comments, on social media, wherever you want. Put it out there. Let people know what you’re doing.

[7:13]Show people what you’re building in the background. Because if you don’t tell us, nobody’s going to know. Thanks so much, guys. This was another episode of Unfiltered and Unshakeable with yours truly, Steve Lichtman. Take it easy, guys.

[0:01]All right, everybody, today, episode 33, and today we’re going to get into something that just absolutely drives me nuts, man. And it might be the thing that’s quietly costing you more business. Maybe more than anything else you’re doing wrong. Yeah? It’s your marketing sentence. It’s the thing that you say when somebody comes up to you at a networking event or just anywhere and goes, hey, man, what do you do? Every time I ask somebody that, I go, what do you do? They say the same thing to me, right? And look, I know we’ve touched on messaging before, but today I really want to be surgical and tactical about this, this one thing, because I see so many smart, capable people, just completely blowing it in this one moment. Like freaking legends that because they stumble and fall over themselves on the, what do you do? Response that I wanted to make this to help people. So here’s the test.

[1:04]If somebody asks you, what do you do? Can you answer in one sentence that makes them feel something? Like, can you feel energy from it? Do you feel somebody’s vibe from it? Not understand everything about your business because nobody will in one line. Like, that’s impossible unless you’re like, I’m a heart surgeon. Okay, great. But that’s not typically what in the world of corporate business doing business with business, that’s not typically what you’re going to hear somebody say. Just feel one thing, whether it’s curiosity, relief, recognition, something, man, right? Just something. You got to feel something when somebody asks you, what do you do? Your response has got to give them energy. Most people give what I would call the LinkedIn bio answer. Yeah, they rattle off their title, maybe the industry, maybe years of experience. And the person’s nodding in front of them, they’re already checked out. They’re like, oh, fuck this, right? That’s just, you know, that’s what they’re thinking. They’re just looking around the room for the next place to walk to.

[2:06]And it’s not because they don’t care. They might actually like you a lot. You’re just boring the hell out of them and nothing landed, right? Because you’re sitting there going, well, I’m a financial analyst with 23 years experience. First, I worked at Wells Fargo. Then I worked at New York Life Insurance. And then I worked out, like, nobody cares. It’s nothing personal. If they get to know you down the road, they’ll care. But they’re not going to care now meeting you in a room with a bunch of other strangers. You need to make them feel something. The sentence that’s going to work, it’s not about what you do. It’s about what changes for someone when they work with you. Think about that for a minute. Think about it this way. Don’t say, I help companies with strategic marketing solutions. I might do that. Hell, I’ve been doing that for 20 years. Maybe more. Definitely more. I’m old now. Instead, I would say something along the lines of, I help consultants go from

[3:09]invisible to booked out in 90 days. Now, I’m not a lead gen guy per se. I do a lot of lead gen work, but don’t get me wrong. That’s not me personally, but that is a better version of instead of walking up and saying, hi, I help companies with strategic marketing solutions. Okay, another marketing guy. I help consultants go from invisible to booked out in 90 days. Now somebody’s got their attention up they’re going wait you get something done in a time frame right there’s a difference you can feel it one describes the service and the other is describing the destination the destination is all people care about nobody cares about what you do let’s be honest with ourselves what we all do is commoditize there’s a million other people doing it unless you’re truly you know even when people say you’re a category of one you’re a category of one of many. That’s just the way that goes. If you truly believe you are a sole single category

[4:10]in anything, that is called delusion. Yeah, unless you’re on stage as an artist or something, and you’re the only one doing that song that way, that time, that how, then yeah, you know, we’re pretty much all in the world of business. Everybody’s kind of doing the same thing, just different versions of it for different people in different ways. So let’s use rise in this situation. The move here is identify. Identify what your people actually want. Not what you offer, what they want to experience on the other side of it. And then simplify your message and distill it down to that one thing. And your homework for this episode is going to be write your one sentence right now while you’re listening. What changes for someone when they work with you? Try to keep it under 15 words, give or take. Read it out loud a bunch of times. If it sounds like a PowerPoint slide, do it again, man. Just do it again. If it sounds like, if it sounds all herky-jerky, Just be like, screw it and start off again. I believe in you. I know that you’ve got this. Look, one sentence. It’s all I’m asking for today. That’s the move.

[5:11]One sentence of what changes for someone when they work with you. And the riff of the episode is going to be this. It’s the one thing I write down for all these. So I’m always going to read it at the end. People don’t buy what you do. They buy where you can take them. And now you guys understand how when I write down one riff for an episode, I could turn it into an eight-minute piece. Thank you so much. I’m Steve Lichtman. This is Unfiltered and Unshakeable, and I will see you on the next episode.

[0:01]All right, boys and girls, we’re going to do it today, right? Episode 32, we’re rocking and rolling. We’re still cranking. I want to talk about something that’s everywhere right now, and it’s the buzzword for everyone, but we’re going to do it in a different way. We’re going to talk about AI today, right? Everybody’s talking about AI. Everybody’s building it up, talking about the hype versions. They’re talking about how their open clause, ordering them a salad and rebooking their airlines. They’re talking about how their Claude co-work has, you know, boiled them a cup of tea with their Wi-Fi enabled kettle. Stuff is stupid. I don’t want a secretary or personal assistant or an administrative assistant or whatever you want to call it. Like, let’s be honest here. Gmail already summarizes my emails for me. Why am I reinventing the wheel here with layers of unnecessary technology? But let’s talk about the real version of AI that actually matters for people running a business, an actual company, a real business, where you’re paying people’s bills and you’re employing people that are paying their bills with

[1:02]their job with you, right? If you’ve got a company of any size, AI matters. It matters big time, but it matters how you do it, right? That’s the biggest thing because here’s what’s happening out there right now. Half the people I talk to think AI is going to replace them, right? They’re worried. They’re like, Steve, what am I going to do? AI is going to replace me in six months, in six years, in six decades, whatever. The other half of the people think it’s somehow going to be a magic pill and it’s just going to save them it’s just oh I have AI now all is well. Both takes are totally wrong at the end of the day. So when you really want to look at what AI is in its current form and state, and look, we could go really, really deep into this stuff. We can go deep into building open claw agentic systems. You know, people are buying, you know, Mac minis and small, you know, PC personal, like these little mini PCs that you can get anywhere. Even NVIDIA makes their own version of a Jetson and a bunch of little mini devices

[2:03]where you could run your own large language model at home on your own computer. offline. That’s great stuff and all, but let’s be honest, for 99.9% of the people, it’s completely unnecessary right now. And honestly, you would be too far ahead of yourself often and put yourself in a technological nightmare that unless you had somebody on staff 100% of the time doing it for you, it would never really work as you were hoping. The people that are showing all these good things on places like X and LinkedIn, they’re people like me with an old deep skill set of technology and coding and, you know, journeymen of building everything so they can kind of make it work. And more importantly, they can make it look better than it is, right? That’s a skill. It’s a skill to make something that’s kind of small look really tall. But that’s what these AI influencers do. Stop watching them. They’re just going to make you think that you could do things that aren’t realistic right now. While they may be realistic in six months, we’re talking about today.

[3:04]AI, at its core, is for most people right now just a really incredibly fast draft machine. It’s a thinking partner that never gets tired, right? It’s a tool that takes the raw material in your head, your expertise, your ideas, your experiences, and it helps you get it out faster and in better shape than you would have on your own. I mean, for a disconnected, unorganized human being like me, AI can be a godsend, right? I have a digital twin. And no, I’m not using Delphi. I use Delphi for other things. It’s a decent tool for what it does. But I don’t use Delphi for this because, quite honestly, it doesn’t operate in the capacity I need it to. It just doesn’t handle things in the way I need it to handle. I need to actually think like me, not pretend to answer questions as me. Right? There’s a big difference there. So I use Claude, and I use Claude Cowork, and I use Claude Code. Right? So I’m sitting there in the CLI terminal coding things. That’s probably more advanced for some, and that’s fine. But let’s just look at Claude as a project tool.

[4:06]Just go into the chat like you would ChatGPT. It’s far more organized, and it’s far better at building out a plan if you give it a lot of information, right? And this goes for any of them, including ChatGPT, including Gemini, Grok, what have you. If you don’t put in good content to start, it’s not going to take your slop and turn it into magic. That’s where the term AI slop comes from. from all the shit people put in, shit in, shit out. And a lot of people are doing that with ChatGPT thinking, oh, let me say, hey, I’m a marketing person, or I’m an insurance salesman, and I need four great marketing posts for my LinkedIn account. Yeah, okay, that’s going to suck. Like, let’s not laugh about it, but let’s laugh about it, right? That’s going to freaking suck. I mean, that’s going to suck so bad. It’s going to suck like 50% of the LinkedIn posts I see these days where it’s so obvious that these people are just putting in the bare minimum and posting it and being like, YOLO, son, and just letting it rip. They’re idiots, all of them. I’m not trying to be mean.

[5:09]Just being honest, they’re lazy, right? It’s not even idiots. They’re just lazy idiots. They’re lazy people who think i can put the bare minimum into a new tool and get a great fucking benefit out of it when at the end of the day they’re not they’re just pushing more crap out on the universe praying that somebody clicks they lack clarity once again so look it’s not it’s not that ai’s smarter than you. It doesn’t know your clients like you do. It doesn’t have your story. It doesn’t have your instincts. You know, it doesn’t have your track record. But what it does have is speed and structure. So for people with my type of brain, speed and structure could be so dangerous because you give me structure and now I can move mountains. Without structure, I’m just a hurricane with no direction. I’m a tornado spinning out of control, not knowing where it’s going. With structure, it’s a tsunami, right? That’s just personality stuff like for any of us. If we could build things faster because we’re better organized and we just have to talk about what we’re good at, well, that makes it really easy.

[6:11]So if you’ve been avoiding AI because you think it’s complicated or because you think it somehow means you’re cheating, come on, man. You can let go of that. That’s not the purpose here. The purpose of using AI is to scale yourself in a smarter capacity. It’s not about just using it for a Q&A. Like you’re asking a, you know, you’re asking a freaking teenager, you know, an answer to a question and then just posting it because you think it’s hip and cool. You’re letting the AI, it’s like, the thing is this, it’s not even letting the AI, you’re expecting the AI to run your business for you while you sleep. And looking at the open claw stuff out there and the things that the agentic AI, it’s very trippy, right? It’s very teasing of how it does this while you’re not doing anything yourself and it runs for you when you’re not, yada, yada. That stuff is great. There’s so much more you used to get out of it right now before that stuff is fully like perfected. It’s going to happen very fast, but you need to get your mind wrapped around how you leverage AI and how as a business owner, you’re winning with AI right now. And you’re going to use it for three things.

[7:13]And this is all I want you to use AI for like the next week. Number one, getting thoughts out of your head faster. You could talk to every single model out there these days, whether it’s chat gpt claude gemini grok whatever you could do voice on all of them when you have an idea put it down into a the same project i have a project in my claude called steve’s digital twin every time i write something new i add it in all my content i added in the podcast which i pretty much do with an outline that i hand write you know it’s it’s you know it’s all, it’s all in there i drop these things in and then when i do the podcast i take my transcriptions and add them since I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say until I start recording, right? That’s just me. So yeah, look, it’s really important to get thoughts out of your head as fast as possible. Step two, turn those thoughts into content and communication. Right. That’s how you can make a social post. If you put a lot of content in, if you just ask it, give me those, you know, give me four marketing posts on

[8:17]the insurance business. Well, it sucks. But if you put in your history as an insurer, you put in all the stories, you put in all the blog posts, you put in all the podcasts you’ve been on, you put in all the everything that you have around that business into it. Well, now you can make some content that’s really focused and communicate really well to people, which is, to me, the whole point of AI is being able to communicate better with people, not worse. And then the third thing, of course, you’re saving hours on tasks that you see your day up, right? Making content, people hate it. I deal with this for decades now. People hate making content. People hate sitting there and creating things. They hate talking about themselves. Using AI, it’s like you’re able to bounce it against somebody that’s not you but is you. So it kind of makes it a lot faster and it makes it feel a lot less scary. Thank you. And that’s where, you know, I want this to take this conversation over the next few weeks. Not all the high-end tech stuff. I’ll do the tech stuff for people that want it. Happy to do it. You know, we could run this. You know, the community is launching next week. So, finally, I got my first course up there. I’m recording another one next week.

[9:18]So, in about a week and a half, two weeks, it should be up. Look, the tech stuff, we could talk about that live. Happy to walk people through live tech stuff. But the practical things, the things that you can actually use, you know, what does it actually do and how does it really fit into a business like yours? That’s what I want to talk about, to help you find ways to leverage the AI tools that are out there to do what you do every day anyway. Do it better, do it faster, and do it with, you know, with better results. Think where it’s thinking for you, thinking as you. So today’s move is simple. If you haven’t opened up ChatGPT or Claude yet, oh my Lord, where the hell have you been? Open it up today and figure something out, right? Just give it one task, something you’ve been procrastinating. Ask it for a first draft. See what happens. Just screw around with it. But you got to start. You don’t need to master it today, but you have to start today. If you’re somebody who has been using it a little bit already, why don’t you do this? The next time that you’re prompting it and you’re working maybe on some content with it, after you give it your content, make sure you’re giving it something,

[10:20]right? After you give it the content, ask it this simple thing. You can say to it, and I’m paraphrasing here. You could go along the lines of, now that you’ve read my content, what are three questions that you have for me to improve the clarity of what I have given you? It’s then going to ask you three questions. Clawed, it does a pop-up. ChatGPT, it does the text. It’ll ask you the three questions. And yeah, you’ll build even more depth. And when you answer them, answer them well. Don’t just one word them or one line them. Give real answers. Like, put time in. Like, if you put energy into it in the beginning, you’re going to have better products in the end. And today’s riff of the episode is going to be this. AI doesn’t replace your expertise. It amplifies it. So stop hiding from AI and learn how to ride this pony into the sunset. All right, guys, it’s Steve here. Steve Lickman, unfiltered and unshakable, and I will talk to you soon.