Start Where You Can Start
This morning I had a great chat with a friend who wanted to get more out of AI. She is using it constantly, more than most people I know, and she still had the feeling that she was missing something.
Her question was simple: Where do I actually start?
Aren’t we all wondering the same thing?? How do I use this thing and what are the implications? Is it OK to use AI? But if I don’t use AI, will I be behind?
My advice… Do not start with the big, impressive build. The system that runs your whole function while you sleep is not the first thing you make. It is the fortieth.
First: Start with the worst part of your week
I told her how I actually started, because it is less flattering than the version people imagine. I did not begin with an engine. I began with the worst feeling in my week. Every Friday I would look at my desk and feel like I had closed nothing, carried everything, and made promises I could no longer find. So the first thing I built was small and unglamorous: a way to catch what I had missed before the week buried it. Not a system. One obstacle, removed.
The next obstacle is embarrassing to admit out loud. I was still taking notes by hand in every meeting. So I removed that one too. Then the next. Each build did exactly one job. Months later they group into something that looks comprehensive, but it was never designed that way. It was assembled in the order the friction showed up.
Second: Start where you are already an expert
Then I gave her the other door, because friction is not the only place to begin. If you wanted to learn to rent a car, you would do it in DC, where you speak the language and know the roads, before you tried it in Mozambique. Start where you already know the terrain. She prices work for a living, so her first build should be pricing, because the judgment is already in her head and the tool only has to carry it. AI amplifies the competence you already have. It does not manufacture the competence you do not.
Third: Make room for the messy middle
What I wanted her to hear most was the part nobody warns you about. It stays messy for a while. Some of my skills are on their eighteenth version. The models change underneath you, and a thing that worked last month stops working this month. I have made peace with that, because the alternative is waiting for it to be clean, and it is not going to be clean. We are early. The permission you actually need is the permission to start badly, iterate in the open, and let the first four attempts be rough.
By the end of the call she was not stuck anymore, and the reason was not that I had handed her a system. It was that I had taken the pressure off arriving fluent. That pressure is the real thing in the way. I call it The Drift, the quiet belief that you are supposed to understand all of it before you touch any of it. You will never understand all of it. Neither do I.
So start where you can start. Pick the obstacle that is wrecking your Fridays, or the task you could already do in your sleep, and build the smallest version of help around it. Then build the next one.
You cannot run a marathon on your first day. You can put on the shoes and walk to the end of the street. That is the whole method.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
