how i get six figure value from AI
meet the 14 members of my personal AI team
AI is versatile. It can do many things.
For example: you can use it to post way too often on LinkedIn. Or recycle your tweets so they republish every few hours. You can make yourself into one hell of a very loud online nuisance.
Please don’t do that. Please don’t.
Imagine this instead:
You now get an extra $125,000 per year, for life. Tax free.
But it’s special money. You can’t buy stuff with it.
What you can do, however, is hire people to help you. Whoever you want.
Who would you hire?
A writer? A tutor? A coach? A marketer? A researcher? A therapist? A creative partner? A financial watchdog?
This is my mental model for what AI actually is. I think it should be yours as well.
Not perfect. Not infallible. But exceedingly valuable cognitive labor, available to you on demand.
Want to meet my full team?
I. boardroom ghostwriter
I don’t think AI will win the Nobel Prize for Literature in my lifetime.
But business writing? Yeah. It already does that extremely well.
I use it for complex emails, executive summaries, business frameworks, rewrites, and compression.
Explain what you want, use the magic words, and you’ll be amazed at how close it gets on the very first pass.
rough equivalent: ~$26k/year
(4 hrs/week of strong business editing at $125/hr)
steal this line: The magic words matter. These are the ones that work best for me in a corporate environment: Write this for an extremely sophisticated business audience that expects nuance and analytical depth, and will be highly impatient with obvious statements or generalities.
II. personal CMO
I hate marketing. Completely. But I know it matters. Immensely.
Good ideas die wearing ugly clothes.
I use AI as my personal Chief Marketing Officer. It helps me test hooks, sharpen titles, pressure-test framing, think about SEO, and figure out which part of an idea is actually legible to another human being.
That outside view is hard to generate from inside your own head. AI is good at it partly because it is tireless. It’s happy to try again and again and again. You just need to pick the winner.
rough equivalent: ~$15.6k/year
(2 hrs/week of positioning or growth-editor help at $150/hr)
try it now: CMO.AI
III. scam buster
Not just pyramid schemes and aggressive telemarketers. If you want to optimize your finances, here’s a better definition:
Scam = anything quietly taking money from you without giving real value back.
Zombie subscriptions count. Dead streaming add-ons count. The app you forgot you were paying for.
AI is very good at tracking those down. My own scam buster is also pushy: when it finds something, it demands that I take action today.
I upload bank statements. It asks questions. We find the waste and eliminate it.
impact: ~$2.4k/year
(about $200/month saved from the various garbage charges my scam buster made me cancel)
IV. infinite language tutor
I have six AI language tutors right now: Spanish, French, Swedish, Danish, Russian, and Romanian.
In Spanish, I go on time-travel adventures.
In French, we only talk about philosophy.
Because I’m insane, there is a multilingual interrogation mode where each question comes in one language and demands a response in another.
Part of what’s going on here is that I’ve found a unique outlet for my own linguistic mania.
Part of what’s going on is that AI is really good at this.
rough equivalent: ~$9.1k/year
(5 tutoring sessions/week at $35/session)
try it now: AI language tutor
V. universal professor
If the language tutor is for foreign languages, this is for everything else.
Search gives you pages.
A professor gives you understanding.
This is the role I use whenever I hit something I do not understand and want an actual explanation instead of a search result.
I was watching Devs recently and they discussed different interpretations of quantum physics. So I asked:
Is what they’re saying on the show right or wrong? And teach me enough that I can explain why to another person.
I use this constantly for philosophy, science, economics, software, history, and miscellaneous weird.
rough equivalent: ~$5.2k/year
(2 hrs/week of smart generalist tutoring at $50/hr)
VI. intersect connector
Most business opportunities live in intersections. Most high-impact conversations happen in intersections.
A capability applied to a niche industry. One field translated into another. A general idea adapted to a strange corner of the economy.
AI does not make you a true expert overnight. Expertise is still a long apprenticeship.
What it can do, very quickly, is help you apply your existing expertise to any intersection you have an opportunity to discuss with a client or stakeholder.
I’m an AI guy, a philosophy guy, and a healthcare guy. With AI, I can now “know enough to be dangerous” on topics ranging from liquefied natural gas to M&A in the surface transportation space.
rough equivalent: ~$11.7k/year
(3 hrs/week of junior research or domain-briefing help at $75/hr)
VII. AI driving instructor
There is a key way in which AI is different from any other technology you’ve experienced.
It can explain itself to you. AI can teach you how to use AI.
But you have to ask.
A surprising amount of frustration comes from people trying to guess the workflow instead of just asking for one.
So I open a chat and say things like:
How would you do this?
What tools should I use?
One of the highest-leverage shifts is: STOP asking AI to do things. START asking AI how to ask AI to do things.
Meta, right?
rough equivalent: ~$3k/year
(rough equivalent of ongoing AI coaching and workflow help)
VIII. mockup machine
The point is not that AI does your writing for you.
The point is that it can manifest a mockup in real time.
I can talk to it for two minutes and get one shape. Talk to it for two more and get another. Keep going and get a third.
Then I can edit it, reject it, or rewrite over the whole thing. It does not matter.
What matters is that I am no longer staring at a blank page waiting for the muse to show up in a decent mood.
AI is very good at turning rough thought into visible structure. That is often all you need. Once the mockup exists, the real work gets much easier.
rough equivalent: ~$19.5k/year
(3 hrs/week of developmental editing or writing-collaboration help at $125/hr)
IX. amanuensis
I’ve always loved this word. It sounds so…sophisticated.
Everyone should have an amanuensis. And now everyone can.
I do not do my best thinking sitting in front of a computer. I think while walking, reading, wandering, half-watching TV, or generally being out in the world.
So I keep AI on my phone as a running capture thread.
I throw it ideas, article titles, strange questions, business concepts, turns of phrase, and fragments I do not want to lose. Later, when I am ready, it can group them, clean them up, expand them, and help me synthesize.
Don’t sit in front of a screen unless absolutely required. Humans were not meant for that.
rough equivalent: ~$5.2k/year
(2 hrs/week of note-wrangling or research-assistant help at $50/hr)
X. artist in residence
Effective communication is often multimedia.
Most of us are not.
Some people can write. Some can draw. Some can think visually. Some can hear structure in music. Very few can do all of it.
AI helps close that gap.
It lets a writer become more visual. It lets a verbal thinker sketch. It lets an idea start in one medium and quickly pick up form in another.
Personally, I use it for infographics, pictures, comics, and songs. In almost every post I write.
rough equivalent: ~$6k/year
(2 small creative or visual-concepting sessions/month at $250 each)
try it now: visuals, infographics, songs.
XI. life transformation engine
I’ve published a lot of AI tools and prompts for inner work and self-transformation.
LIFETRACK is my favorite, the one I personally use every day.
The premise is devastatingly simple: your life is predetermined. Like a train on a track. It’s going where it’s going. It is what it is. But you get to bend the track, a little bit or a lot, exactly one time each day. And you do that by making a single free choice.
It is amazing how radically this simplifies everything, and how effectively AI can implement it.
rough equivalent: ~$5.2k/year
(1 substantive coaching session/week at $100/session)
try it now: LIFETRACK
XII. content replicator
In Star Trek, a replicator reorganizes matter into whatever you ask for.
AI can do the same thing for content.
Give it an article and it can turn it into a thread. Give it a thread and it can turn it into a memo. Give it a memo and it can turn it into a prompt, a checklist, a lesson, a pitch, or a version for another audience or industry.
A surprising amount of knowledge work is not creation.
It is transformation, repurposing, adjustment.
Let AI take the first pass at that for you.
rough equivalent: ~$7.8k/year
(2 repurposing or format-conversion tasks/week at $75 each)
XIII. psychoanalysis button
One thing I love is that AI gives me a psychoanalysis button I can press in the middle of work. Five minutes with Freud.
At any moment I can ask:
What bias might I be bringing here?
What does the fact that we are even having this conversation say about me at a deeper level?
What are the ways in which I’m weird that will resonate with my readers? What are the ways that will be off-putting to them?
Not therapy. Not diagnosis. Not some mystical oracle.
Just a very immediate way to inspect your own mind while the thought is still warm.
It lets self-analysis show up inside the flow of work instead of requiring a separate session.
rough equivalent: ~$5.2k/year
(1 reflective or therapeutic-style session/week at $100/hr)
XIV. signal/noise
Knowledge used to be a scarce resource.
Not anymore.
We live in an age of information obesity. There’s just too much. And, frankly, most of it simply isn’t worth your time.
I pick my topic and my timeframe. Usually it’s AI, but not always.
Signal tells me what is actually happening, how it relates to the big picture, and what it means for me or my stakeholders or my clients. Noise tells me about all the stuff distracting everyone else.
rough equivalent: ~$5.2k/year
(1 hr/week of analyst-style filtering or critical review at $100/hr)
try it now: signal/noise
additional bonus try it now: bullshit defense system
the bottom line
Add the numbers and you get something like $125k–$130k a year of value.
Could you argue with the exact total? Of course.
That is not really the point.
The point is that once you stop treating AI like a chatbot and start treating it like a team of assistants, the value compounds quickly.
If you want to go harder down this road, you will find all the key tools you need to get started on this Substack. For access to everything, please consider a paid subscription:
I couldn’t have written this article without the help of Amanuensis, Artist-in-Residence, CMO, and Mockup Machine.
Which members of your team are going to be the MVPs of your next project?
That value is insane, and it's just going to get better.
Thanks for sharing your breakdown!