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iza,
A few weeks ago, on a live AI coaching call inside our community, I rebuilt a spreadsheet on camera.
It was not a fun spreadsheet, either: a regulatory waste report that one of our members, an environmental compliance pro, had maintained by hand for 15 years. Every month, with the kind of formulas you pray over before touching.
Claude rebuilt it in under an hour, automated, with error checks built in. I asked her if it beat the version she'd used for a decade and a half. She said, “Yes, very much so.”
I told the group right after:
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“In the old model of knowledge work, we didn't care about the bread slices. What we thought was the most valuable part was the middle, the meat, the cheese, the toppings, the sauce. Now, Claude can build financial models so much faster and so much better than you can. So what is your value now, today? And I would argue that now the value becomes the slices of bread.”
Demir Bentley · Lifehack Tribe call |
I call it the sandwich principle. One slice of bread is knowing where things stand right now: the problems and the risks. The other slice is describing what done looks like, in enough detail that someone else could check it. The middle, the build itself, is the part AI made cheap.
Most people get this backwards. They pour their energy into protecting the middle, the expertise they spent years building, and they starve the bread.
MIT researchers looked at corporate AI pilots and found roughly 95% of them produce no measurable return. Ninety-five percent! The tool is rarely what failed. The teams couldn't describe where they were or what done looked like. All meat, no bread.
I'm not a born tech person, and I say that as a guy who now rebuilds spreadsheets on camera. My member didn't need to become technical either. On the call I told her, “you just have to be good at describing the problem. That's it.” You can start building that skill this week.
If you want to know where you stand, we built a short quiz for this. It measures how much leverage you're getting from AI today and shows you the highest-value next step for someone in your position. A few minutes, start to finish.
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