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Am I getting too nerdy, too deep into water wells? So how many businesses do you have in the closet right now that halfway built? For me, this was a lot of them, right? I went wide. I just thought that, hey, more businesses, more ideas, more income streams, right? No, wrong. Absolutely wrong. Any successful person in the world, pay attention to them, don't see where they're at now. See where they started. They all made their money. And one core thing first, they didn't have just a million, you know, income streams to start with. Let's say you drilling and you don't hit water, you're about 100ft in the ground and then all of a sudden, you know, say on your phone and says, hey, there's actually water over here. And so you, you never actually get to the water. You, you're constantly being distracted. You shouldn't just abandon your hole that you've been drilling for the past, you know, multiple hours because you've already made progress there. Because pretty soon you have a bunch of half drilled holes in the, in the ground with no water to feed your family. And you keep on finding this next fastest path to get there. You keep wanting there to be a shortcut to success, but in reality, there is no shortcut. You absolutely need to focus on one hole to get to the water, to get to your business, to get to your freedom, to get to your money, to get to your wealth, to get to your success. That's how this works. Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband, dad of three and I'm the founder of Everbee Everbee, Everbee Everbee, where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator. And I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where next generation of builders get built. All right, welcome again back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about AI and it's, it's potential help and, or hurt on you and your business. We're going to be talking about distractions and shiny things, but also talk about innovation and where the opportunity lies. As always, welcome again back to the podcast. I am here in the office and if you see a shining light on my, on my, my face, it's because I don't have window treatments or window drapes yet in, in the office and I also don't have a background or a picture frame here yet, still set up. And you're going to hear a little bit of an echo because I don't have much on the walls, so bear with me. It's not the, the finest quality, but that's totally okay because we're just here to talk about E commerce and, and business and online business and entrepreneurship and, and all those things. So today, let's jump in. We're going to be talking about AI and the news that's constantly popping out about this new model, this new business that started and got a breached a billion dollars in 30 seconds after putting in a prompt. Obviously I am exaggerating, but you guys understand what I'm saying, right? If you go and scroll on LinkedIn, you're going to see a million new ways to use AI and how you're doing it absolutely wrong. You should have been doing it this way the whole time. And you see a YouTube video that says the same thing and a TikTok video that says the same thing, and guess what? There's some elements of learnings in there, but most of that is all clickbaits. It is all noise and it's not serving you. Now, does that mean that you shouldn't watch those things and consume those things? No, it doesn't mean that. I'm not saying that. Just make sure you have that filter on of like there's only about probably 30% truth in this, right? And so you want to kind of filter that noise out because really, at the end of the day when. No, no, no, I'm not trying to throw shade to those content creators, those people posting on LinkedIn, but they want your click, they want your attention. And the only way for them to get that attention is by saying something out, outlandish and crazy. And then you're spending all of your, you're wasting all of your time, you've been wasting all of your money, you've been wasting, you've been doing everything wrong and, and it's just not true, right? And I again, I'm not blaming the folks for doing that. I'm just saying to you, filter that stuff out. Signal versus noise, right? And you want to focus on the signal, the learning and filter out the noise. So how much my question for you, if you're listening to this, is, is this happening to you? Are you being distracted? Are you being, feeling like these, this sense of FOMO from these new videos, these, these new articles that are constantly popping out about some person starting a business in 30 seconds and, you know, reaching a million dollars and overnight. So you need to go and do it. You need to use this model and do it this way. Or are you feeling that sense of. That behindness? Right. Is that. If that's a word, I'm making it up. That feeling of I'm behind everyone else is ahead of me. AI is accelerating so fast, and if I just feel like I'm in a rat race or maybe hamster wheel trying to keep up, I have news for you. Just slow it down. Slow it down for a minute. For a minute. Just zoom out for a second. What's going to happen? And what's already happening is it's actually always happened if you pay attention. People have shiny things syndrome. That's what we call this. And they jump and they find out. They hear about a new process, a new video, a new TikTok thing. It doesn't matter. New, new newspaper article back in the day, and they jump and they jump and they jump. And those people, people that do that. And it could be you, and it could. It's been me in the past. That person picks their head up three, four years, five years, maybe 10 years later. And they are usually the ones that are disappointed with the results. They're usually the people that are disappointed with the results because they're jumping from thing to thing to thing. And they are almost like. It's almost like they're trying to find a shortcut to, To. To the money, to the success, to the freedom. And they're not sticking with something long enough to truly have that breakthrough, that penetration that it actually takes. They're not sticking in their lane. They're constantly switching lanes. And I relate to this. I relate this to. My family grew up. I grew up drilling water wells. So if anybody understands you, you. You literally, you know, have a. A rig, a drill rig. We called it a pump. Basically a big truck with a. A. A drill bit. And it's drilling down into the ground, and it drills in it until you hit water. And after that, you. You sometimes you have to drill a hundred feet, 200ft, 300ft, sometimes 700ft. So a thousand feet, sometimes 1200ft in the ground. Right? You don't really know where water is. You know, water's down there somewhere if you drill deep enough. Typically, that's how it works. Now, what am I saying? Why am I talking about water wells? Um, right now it's like someone you personally set up to drill, and you were like, okay, there's water down there. I'm gonna keep Drilling until I have water. And so you start drilling. You drill and you drill. It gets hot, it gets harder. You're, you know, you're moving a lot of dirt. You're, it's just, it's hot out there. It's, it's, it takes time, right? You're drilling, you're drilling. Sometimes this stuff takes, this takes multiple days. This is a multiple day process. In this case, let's say you spend the first three hours and you're drilling and you don't hit water. You're about a hundred feet in the ground and then all of a sudden you see this thing pop up, you know, let's say on your phone and says, hey, there's actually water over here. And so over here by this tree. And so you pick up all of your stuff, all of your rig, your tools, and now you drive your truck over there and you drill down, you start drilling again. And then all of a sudden you're scrolling again on your phone and you see TikTok, you say, oh, you need to actually be drilling near cactuses. And so you're like, oh, shoot, now you're a hundred feet down again and you pick it all up again and you move over there and you never actually get to the water, which is about 800ft down. So you're constantly being distracted. Now, a better approach to this, and I hope this makes sense, by the way, maybe none of this lands. So let me know if this lands or not in the comments or whatever, wherever you, wherever you receive this, totally okay with this not landing. But for me it makes perfect sense. And then so should you, should you not, you know, learn? Should you not actually listen to other people or experts in the market to tell them where water is and a better place to drill water? No, not saying that, but you shouldn't just abandon your hole that you've been drilling for the past, you know, multiple hours. Cause you've already made progress there. So what do you do then? So what do I do? So I just, I just don't listen to anybody and just like not learn. No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying, what I'm suggesting to you, to reflect on, is maybe consider drilling your drilling your well. And then maybe while you're drilling, you spend maybe 10, 15% of your resources, maybe your time, maybe your energy learning about the next, the next best place to drill for water. Maybe you spend 10 or 15%, maybe 20% of your time, you know, drilling another one. But you don't abandon your Current hole. Now, what am I not saying? What I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting pulling out completely. I'm also not suggesting pulling out 50% of your, of your time and effort because therefore you become, pretty soon you have a bunch of half drilled holes in the, in the ground with no water to feed your family or to give your family and to power your community. You follow me here? Am I getting too nerdy, too deep into water wells? As if you could respond and, and let me know. So my question for you is, how much are you doing this? How many empty holes do you have, right, with no water in them, and you're only about a hundred feet deep. You knew that the water is around 800ft deep, minimum, but you're only drilling everything about a hundred, a hundred feet deep. How many of those do you have, right? Because you know, you know the water is 800ft deep. You know the effort that's gonna take to get there. And you keep on finding this next fastest path to get there, right? You keep wanting there to be a shortcut to success, but in reality there is no shortc. But right there, there could be ways and tools to get you there more efficiently, maybe more optimized and maybe more, even more effective, maybe even faster sometimes. But you absolutely need to focus on one hole, to drill it deep enough, get to the water, to get to your business, to get to your freedom, to get to your money, to get to your wealth, to get to your success. Right? That's how this works. So how many businesses do you have in the closet right now that are halfway, halfway built? For me, this was a lot of them. I had plenty of them at the time, right? I went wide. I went wide. I just thought that, hey, more businesses, more ideas, more income streams, right? No, wrong. Absolutely wrong. You need to any successful person in the world, pay attention to them. Don't see where they're at now. See where they started. They all made their money and one core thing first. After they made their money, they moved it into a more diverse portfolio. That's when they started doing all these things, right? They didn't just have one, they didn't have just a million, you know, income streams to start with. No, they did not do that. That's, that's poor advice. If you're talking about wealth strategy, wealth creation, wealth or business building, you need to focus on one thing, one customer with a core set of products to solve problems for that customer. That's how true wealth, true freedom is built. After you get that going, you can have the privilege of, of looking elsewhere and doing it again. Does that make sense? So the way that I think about this is like a three step framework, right? Is one, you need to pick your lane. You need to, to find your hole, the water well hole, right? And you need to drill there repeatedly over and over and over again. And you don't really want to pick your head up too much, only 10 or 15% of the time. So step one, pick your lane, right? So do this. Step two, 80, 20, your focus, okay? This is your anchor. This is what you need to be focused on. Your 80% needs to be on that hole. Maybe ideally a hundred percent, but if you have to scratch that itch, if you find some article, allow yourself 10, 15 max, 20% to, to innovate, to think about those things outside of your core business. Okay? So 20, 80% execution. This is serving your customers. This is improving your business products. This is improving your marketing. If you're selling something, you want to be selling those things. Optimizing your funnel, adding, testing new things inside of your funnel. Okay? 20% max exploration, testing new AI tools, right? Trying new workflows, thinking bigger, thinking about the vision of the company and talking and interviewing other people about the vision of where you want to take, you know, your business, yada, yada, yada, right? That's where you should be there. 10, 15, 20% max in that exploration bucket. 80% needs to be on execution. Serving your people, driving traffic to, to your, to your site, to your store, to your business and actually delivering for them. Optimizing those email marketing flows, right? There's abandoned cart checkouts, those seasonal, the seasonal product line that you want to, to create, adding a new product, a new solution to serve your customers. Notice I didn't mention new customers. I mentioned the same customers. That's the same water hole. That's the water well. Okay, now step three, use AI to amplify your current business, not replace your current business with a new business idea. And this new app that I can build in 30 seconds, I could build this app and I can. Dude, that's not going to get you where you want to be. You could spend 10 or 15% on those things. Cool. Explore. Scratch that entrepreneurial itch. I know that I have that, but that doesn't pay the bills. That doesn't serve your family, that doesn't get you where you need to be. So use AI to, to amplify your current business, serve your current customers better to get more of those current customers to your store, to your site and this is where the magic really happens. Okay? This is where you can scratch the itch. And also, right, that new AI itch, that new, like, innovation itch, this new just, you know, shiny thing itch. If you align it with your current customers, this one can change the, change the game for you. Does that make sense? So you don't want to start a new, new a new business just because you can, right? You don't want to chase random app ideas just because you can build them in two, in two seconds. You don't want to abandon your advantage, right? And a lot of times your advantage, if you're listening to this, you probably, your advantage is typically your expertise or your understanding of that specific type of customer that you've been serving or that specific type of product that you've been building. So you don't want to abandon all that advantage, right? You want to, you know, deepen it. You want to amplify that with AI, not to just completely abandon it. And I see this mistake happen time and time again. I've made this mistake over and over and over again. I don't know exactly why this happens, but it absolutely does. And I don't necessarily even think that it's wrong. I just think that you need to be aware of it and almost align all these things together and that's where your true power will be. So you want to use AI. Okay, I'm not saying to not go and, and, and try new models. I'm doing it myself. It's fun. It's innovating, it's exciting time. We're in the best time of, of history right now. It's extremely exciting. You don't want to use it distract you. You want to use AI to move faster. You want to use AI to create more. You want to use AI to help you serve your customers better. Better. You want to use your AI to market to your customers better. Okay. Just because you can build something in 20 seconds doesn't mean that you absolutely should build, be building something in 20 seconds. Right? You could do all kinds of things, but doesn't mean you should. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Okay, I'm going to break break down back into three. What's the three things? One, step one, pick your lane. Step two, 80, 20 your focus. 80, 80% on execution, 20% on exploration. And three, use AI to amplify your current business, not to replace your current business. Okay, so that's pretty much it for the things I want to talk about today. Uh, you. If, if this was helpful, let me know. I'm just, I, I'm honestly curious. We've been doing this solo episodes for I think just a few weeks now and I'm honestly just curious about your feedback. So if you wouldn't mind just sharing wherever you're watching this or listening to this whether it's on on Spotify or on Apple podcasts or other places or maybe on YouTube, let me know in the comments or somewhere if this is helpful and then also if you wouldn't mind just asking asking me the questions that I didn't answer for you if you have any specific questions. I always want to to get our questions from people from the community, from the entrepreneurship community and it's just way easier to create, to create education around this to to spark ideas to actually solve real problems. So let me know if this is helpful how it can help you more as always and I appreciate you being part of the community. Talk to you soon.