Name: You’re Not Behind (Yet): How to Learn AI in 19 Minutes
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T21:35:00.000Z
Duration: 19 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In this video we're going to talk through the five phase process that you can follow to become fluent, native, super productive using AI in about three months.

Adverbs of manner

Increasingly, business owners are genuinely making decisions about who to hire, who to fire and who to promote based on their level of AI fluency.

And if you do in fact happen to own your own business, there is also a widening gap between businesses that are using AI properly and businesses that are not.

So this video is split up into five distinct phases.

There's timestamps for everything down below and let's get into it.

Phase one is building your foundations and this is going to be week number one.

Now, before you try and do anything clever with AI, we just need to make sure that we have the habits and tools appropriately set up for us to actually remember to actually use it.

I consider these things non negotiables for everyone in my team and so if you skip them, I think your life will be a lot harder than it needs to be.

Foundation number one is use AI for everything that you were initially thinking of using Google for.

My personal preference is Claude by Anthropic for most things, but

you can use ChatGPT, you can use Grok, you can use Claude, you can use Gemini, whatever seems reasonable, whatever you already have access to.

Foundation number two is always have that particular website open in a pinned tab because the habit we want to be developing is basically always having some kind of AI chat window open on your screen or whatever with literally everything you're doing.

Foundation number three is to use your voice rather than your keyboard.

There are also things like whisper flow and the built in dictation on Windows and Mac and also there's now built in dictation into most of these AI tools and you will find that if you are speaking to the AI, you can generally speak a lot faster and you can generally ramble a lot more compared to if you are trying to type.

And honestly, this one habit will absolutely transform how much value you get from AI.

So if you're not using it already, then feel free to get started.

Foundation number four is to download the mobile apps.

This means you can use AI again as a Google replacement or as a thinking buddy.

Wherever you are, you are in the world because you always have your phone on you.

You can use it while walking, you can use it while commuting, you can use it while on the sofa, if you're on the toilet, you can talk to the AI if you're in bed and you're one of those people that brings a phone into bed with you.

I don't recommend it, but you can talk to the AI in bed if you really want to.

And then foundation number five is to automatically record your online and ideally as well, your in person meetings.

So you probably do zoom calls or Google Meets or that kind of thing.

And there are loads of free AI tools that let you automatically record and transcribe those zoom calls.

The one we've been using for the last five years is called Grain.

And if you want something free, then Fathom is usually one that I recommend.

Learning how to use AI, getting these five foundations in place.

If you're watching this and you haven't done any of these five things, 100%, I'd recommend pausing the video, doing those things and then coming back because all of the rest is going to build on this foundation.

Phase two is using AI as your coach and this is going to be week number two.

Now this is where we're actually going to start using AI in a meaningful way beyond just being a Google replacement.

But the key thing to know is we are not yet asking AI to do our work for us.

We're asking it to help us think better about the work that we are already doing ourselves.

For example, on my team we've got Nicole, who is our social media manager responsible for growing my Instagram.

Now Nicole could go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and she could say, I am a social media manager tasked with growing an Instagram profile from 1 million followers to 1.2 million followers in the next 90 days.

The account belongs to productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal.

What are the highest leverage things I should focus on?

What mistakes do you see people in my role commonly make?

What questions should I be asking my manager to make sure I'm set up for success?

Or for example, we have Gio, who's one of my team members, who leads our student success for our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is our online business mentorship program.

And she could say, I run student success for a high ticket business mentorship program.

Currently, the biggest thing our students are struggling with is defining their niche and coming up with a reasonable offer within a two week period.

We find that a lot of them tend to overthink and overanalyze before taking action.

How could I be thinking about how to solve this particular problem?

And then to use an example from my own life as the business owner, I might go to Claude and say something like, my goal for 2026 is to grow our business's revenue from $5 million to $10 million.

And I think the biggest lever we have for that is our new Lifestyle Business Academy product.

Can you interview me, ask me a bunch of questions and help me figure out what are the key levers I should do as it relates to annual planning and quarterly planning for 2026.

And so if you don't have your own, like, coach that's helping you with a job or a business, or even if you do like, I've got a couple of coaches that I work with, it's still very helpful to use the AI as a kind of thought buddy slash coach to be able to ask you questions that can then help you come up with insights that can help improve your performance at your job or your business.

Now, this is where the fact that we are recording all of our calls then also really helps.

For example, you could have a team meeting.

You could have a meeting with your manager.

You could have a meeting with your direct report, and

you could take the transcript of that call and you could ask the AI to give you insights based on that call.

So, for example, Nicole, who's in charge of my Instagram, could say, this is a recording of a conversation I had with my manager, Angus, where he was coaching me on how I can be thinking about our Instagram strategy better.

Based on this conversation, can you suggest a curriculum for me to follow over the next two weeks to improve my skills?

That would be a totally reasonable thing to do.

If I've done a coaching session with our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy, the whole thing is recorded and transcribed, so I can then chuck it into AI and I can say, this was a coaching session that I ran for my students in my Lifestyle Business Academy.

Based on the transcript, I want you to tease out the key themes that came up, the key struggles that the students were struggling with, so that I can use it to help improve our core curriculum.

And while you're there, please do give me feedback on my own teaching style and any blind spots that you notice.

Another really useful prompt is you can literally ask the AI to interview you about your job.

You could say something like, I want you to interview me about what I actually do in my role and help me identify what's high leverage and what's probably a waste of time.

And I guarantee that if you just use that super simple prompt with literally any job that you have, you could probably find ways to to actually just do a better job and waste less time doing things that really don't move the needle.

Oh, by the way, if any of this stuff is Confusing.

Don't worry, we've got a link down below to a totally free Google Doc, which is like an AI getting started curriculum that you can just download copy into your own Google Drive and you can just like follow it along if you like.

Now, obviously we want to give the caveat around AI limitations.

It's really helpful to have as a thought partner.

But the way that I think about the AI tools is that it's sort of like having a very smart colleague who reads a lot of books, but

who doesn't have much context on anything other than the knowledge that they've gotten from books.

And so it's very useful to be able to talk to that person, to kind of, kind of mirror your own thoughts or ask you questions, or help you think deeper about something.

But I would be very careful about taking its advice and treating that advice as gospel.

Like you really want to make sure that the advice that you actually agree with the advice rather than just blindly following what it says.

So by the end of week two, if you're following along with this method, you should hopefully have by this point the habit of turning to AI whenever you're stuck with anything in your personal or professional life.

And also, even if you're not stuck just as a way of optimizing your performance for whatever goals you want to work towards even more.

Oh, by the way, if you've made it this far into the video and you really want to nail your foundational understanding of AI rather than just knowing how to use the tools, then one way I found super helpful for doing this is Brilliant who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

I have been using and loving brilliant since like 2019 and what I love about the product is that it helps you get way better at maths and coding and computer science through step by step interactive lessons and personalized practice where you genuinely learn by doing.

Brilliant has helped me get a foundational understanding of crypto and all the cryptocurrencies and cryptographic stuff that goes on behind the scenes there.

It's helped me get a foundational understanding of how algorithms work and how programming in Python works.

And recently their How AI Works course has been absolutely brilliant.

And they basically break down how large language models like ChatGPT actually function behind the scenes, which is a incredibly fascinating.

And also it helps you actually use AI better when you understand how it works.

The other cool thing about Brilliant is that they really focus on problem solving rather than just getting you to watch videos.

So yes, they give you content to help you understand the concept, but

then they give you a problem with like an interactive interface that involves using that concept to solve the problem.

And that just makes learning way more fun and way more interactive.

The courses are crafted by a world class team of researchers from MIT and Harvard and Stanford, and

they're designed for ages 10 through 110.

So whether you're a beginner or you're looking to level up your skills, there's going to be something for you.

So if you would like to learn for free on Brilliant For a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org Ali Abdaal or scan the QR code on screen or click the link down in the video description and that will all get you 20% off the annual premium subscription.

So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video.

All right, so now we're moving on to phase three where things get a little bit more interesting.

Because so far we have only asked AI to help us think.

We haven't actually asked it to do anything other than that just yet.

And phase three is where that's going to change.

So phase three is using AI as your worker.

And this is going to be weeks three and four.

Now here is where we're going to get the AI to actually start doing stuff for us.

The mistake I've seen most people make is that they will go straight to this phase and they'll say something like, write me this Instagram post.