#13: AI With Me by Richmond Alake - Elevating Your Game by Rising Above Self-Competition
Elevating Your Game by Rising Above Self-Competition
I spend over an hour in the gym most days of the week. I have done this regularly for the past seven years.
Why?
My body responds well to weightlifting, and for some weird reason, it feels like meditation. The solitude of the gym, the rhythm of lifting heavy weights, the countdown - it's a peculiar therapy that soothes my mind after a long day of bashing keyboards, staring and glaring at monitors.
I only train alone, and I don't really talk much when I'm in the gym.
But recently, I trained with a regular gym goer at my local gym. And one thing shocked me. He started his workout at a weight level that I only manage towards the end of my sets. So for more context, my last set of an incline dumbbell press workout is 40kg, but he started his first set at 40kg.
I was shocked because he wasn't bigger than me, not blowing my own horns here, but I look more muscular than him...and he was shocked I wasn't lifting heavy as well.
Well, to save face, I decided to do the same weights he did.
And my body surprised me. Long story short, my last set in this gym session was done with 55kg. A week ago, I would have told you, in gym lingo, my max was 40kg.
My body was ready, but my mind wasn't.
This experience shocked me.
Honestly, I am physically more capable than my mental conditioning had led me to believe.
I am now reflecting on not just my physical capabilities but my mental and entrepreneurial capabilities.
Similar to the way I train solo, I work remotely in a home office. I like it, it feels nice, and I feel like I'm working at a decent level of my potential.
Or am I?
What if I had a tribe of other entrepreneurs, founders, developers, and AI enthusiasts, and I was able to gauge my performance against theirs in a healthy way, obviously? Will I tap into another level of my potential I didn't know existed because I work in 'almost' isolation?
I'll let you know in the future the result of my quest to find my tribe.
MiniPT
Over at MiniPT, we have been exploring ways to reach brand ambassadors early.
Why?
Well, tight budgets have necessitated innovative approaches, replacing marketing expenses with authenticity and value addition.
Our solution to this is to be authentic and provide value where possible. So an idea that's been thrown around is to leverage my domain knowledge of AI and the trends in the space itself to provide a crash course to fitness influencers...for free.
We are going to become a fitness influencer secret adviser to most things AI. And in turn, we hope to build a long-lasting relationship with some of the fitness influencers we invite to these private events.
OpenSpeech
OpenSpeech is designed to help convert audio content into written form content, and our initial assumption is that this tool will be picked up by content creators.
Based on this, we decided to allow users of the tool to upload audio via the file system on their devices.
Taking usability into factor, the method by which we allowed users to upload audio to our tool changed.
The content creators that are our early adopters utilise YouTube a lot. So we decided to limit the number of clicks and allow users to place a YouTube link of a video into OpenSpeech simply, and then we worked our magic.
We then decided to go a step further and add an in-browser recording functionality as well.
Yes, there are now three ways to upload audio in OpenSpeech, three is a lot, but we are in an experimental phase and are hoping to see which method sticks with our early adopters.
From a technical perspective, look for low-hanging fruits, features that you can implement early in the product life cycle. Building AI consumer products has a lot to do with experimentation.
Need a consultant Product Manager and advice on your startup product and features?
Then meet Joash Johnson. A long friend of mine that's crushed it in product design, development and management. He's worked at Amazon for 2 years as a product manager in both the UK and the US.
He's currently focusing on his startup ventures but providing consultancy services for Founders, startups and business owners.
Feel free to reach out to him and let him know Richmond sent you.
Thanks for reading
Thanks for reading.
Engineer | Builder | Writer | Podcaster
Richmond Alake
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