Get 🐐 Status with AI
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Hey ! True Story: You know that feeling you get sometimes — somebody scrolling past a hundred posts a day stops on yours long enough to actually disagree with you? That happened a few weeks back… I posted this on LinkedIn: Here’s the post underneath it, word for word: Every good thing I built started with a slightly crazy foresight no one around me could see.
That a self-taught 18 year old doing websites on the side in 2001 could out-build the agencies. (Yep — because they didn’t exist yet) Two years later companies were seeking me out…
That WordPress, back when it had barely added pages, was worth betting a business on. It runs almost half of the internet now…
That a DSLR photo camera could capture video nobody in three cities was shooting yet. DSLRs are the standard now…
See the pattern?
None of that was reasonable at the time…
I had zero evidence for any of it.
That’s the thing about betting on yourself…
The belief can’t show up after the proof.
It shows up before. Or you never start.
You move first… then the results catch up.
Most experts want a guarantee before they publish anything.
So they don’t publish.
They wait on the thinking to be finished, the framework to be clean, the title to be bigger.
It never is.
Meanwhile the one with half their track record is out there being wrong in public — and getting known for it.
Here’s my current unreasonable bet.
AI for personal branding isn’t about prompts. It isn’t about workflows.
It’s asset building — around YOU.
Almost nobody is saying that out loud yet.
I spent two years proving it on the hardest subject I had.
My own mind.
10.2 million words, structured until the machine could argue a point the way I’d argue it.
Not a chatbot. A custom model built on one person — me.
No fake confidence. No manifesting nonsense.
Five future-proof steps that turn an unreasonable bet into something you own.
That’s what I put out into the world. Here’s what came back in the comments. Elton — graphic designer, illustrator, been in the trenches on original concepts for years — wasn’t buying it: “I beg to differ. You don’t get to call yourself a G.O.A.T. if literally anybody can do what you’re doing.” 🤣🤣🤣 Read that again. Sit with him for a second, because this is where most invisible experts just nod, agree and stop unpacking the brother’s response… But here’s the thing… He’s not wrong. Nobody gets to crown themselves anything. Self-proclaimed GOAT is a punchline, not a title — A man handing himself a trophy he made (out of paper-mache) in an empty room. But Elton had one tiny flaw in his own logic... It’s the same thought you’ve probably held too, every time you’ve watched somebody build a following with a tool you also have access to and thought: if I can use it too, what makes them special? Here’s exactly what I told him: Elton — I completely agree that you can’t be a self-proclaimed GOAT — but you can engineer GOAT status.
I see it happen all the time.
Someone’s been putting in the work, showing up in the best places with the best ideas — and boom!
The GOAT 🐐 emojis start landing in the comment sections…
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I think the disconnect here is the use of AI…
We are in total agreeance — you’ll NEVER get GOAT status just throwing prompts in ChatGPT (or Gemini or Claude, etc) and doing light edits and posting…
NEVER. That’s using what I call “RAW AI”.
99.96% of the planet uses RAW AI…
That’s NOT what I’m referring to.
There’s RAW AI. Then there’s YOUR AI.
I’m talking about capturing YOUR UNIQUE experiences, backstories, voice prints, humor styles (or lack of), knowledge, thought processes, POVs.
And pairing all those with YOUR BEST AUDIENCE to solve THEIR UNIQUE problems, answer their toughest questions and make the transformations they dream of…
THEN use YOUR AI — a version of AI specifically trained by YOU and ONLY YOU — to help you craft GOAT-level content at blazing speed.
With this system, no one else on the planet has YOUR AI.
So literally nobody else can do what you’re doing…
Hope this helps 🤙🏾
That’s not advice I gave Elton and forgot about… That’s the whole gap between “I post with AI” and “nobody else on earth can build what I build.” One is a tool sitting in everybody’s hand at the same time. The other only exists because you spent real time feeding it your mind, your history and your voice — not a stranger’s. You’re not competing with a tool. You’re competing with everybody else who’s too impatient to feed it anything real. Now here’s where it gets interesting. Elton didn’t stop at the comment… A few days later he slid into my DMs with a follow-up — and it’s a sharper question than the one he asked in public. It’s the real fear sitting under every invisible expert’s hesitation about AI and I’m not going to rush past it just to keep this email short… I’ll give you his questions and my response at the end of this essay (or skip ahead if you can’t wait) — because this next part matters a ton. Here’s what I haven’t said out loud anywhere else yet… Everything I just told Elton — RAW AI versus YOUR AI, engineer-GOAT-don’t-proclaim-GOAT — isn’t something I cooked up for a LinkedIn post… I stumbled onto the real shape of it by accident, back in 2011. With a website, a man who had zero belief in my abilities and dolls — lots of dolls… (weird. I know.) But I’ve been quietly running this framework and sharpening it ever since, against every brand and every world I’ve built or studied since then. So far I’ve only handed the full version to a small closed group — people testing it alongside me before anybody else sees it. I call it The WORLD Method. It’s the one thing I wish I had 4 years ago when I first attempted my own personal brand… I’m not unpacking it today. That’s a bigger essay, and it’s coming. But the most public details on it can be found here. Right now the closed group is the only place it exists outside my own head. The Inner Circle waitlist is the actual line for when my team and I do open it — first look, before I say another word about it anywhere else. 👉 https://links.jyoungel.com/ghostkits Peace and Love. J. Young El P.S. — Elton’s DM, word for word, and my full answer to him: Elton: “Hi Jesse! Thanks for the great feedback on the GOAT post. I totally get it. Although I have a good handle on using AI, I admit I struggle with trusting it because of all the noise about ownership and data. As graphic artists with original concepts how do we capitalize on AI, but not have our ideas assimilated into the machine?” Me: Elton — good question man! Start with the toggles. Claude: Settings → Privacy → Preferences → “Help improve our AI models.” It’s on by default. Turn it off. Then check Adobe, Figma, Canva — all of them. Same switch, different app. Sometimes it’s plain: “Don’t train on my data.” Sometimes it’s dressed up: “Help us improve Photoshop for you and others.” That second one is the same thing wearing a disguise. Turn it off. Then read the terms. A platform can update its ToS to fold your work into training data — you agreed the day you made the account. Most people never read that far. I’m guilty of this too. On the concepts — the U.S. Copyright Office won’t register AI art made with no human authorship. But use it as the starting point and refine it with your own hand — the finished work is protected. You start it (your concept). The machine helps you iterate. You finish it. And Chuck D said it best decades ago, when asked about Napster: “you can’t download me.” AI is just a tool — it’s not an asset. Your ideas aren’t the assets either. You are. Your processes to execute your ideas are. Your relationships with your customers are. Protect the last three with your life. Use the first two to your advantage… |