AUTHOR:
Shernon Hague
MONTH:
March
YEAR:
2025
Issue 5 / Mar 2025
You may now be aware of the recent advances in artificial intelligence technology. Chat GPT, Grok, Midjourney and now recently Deepseek, have dominated discourse in the AI technology space.
The trend is clear.
As we endeavour to maintain maximum personal freedom in our lives, we must consider the effects artificial intelligence will have on society moving forward.
As the technology gets better it is probable that artificial intelligence will replace the need for human workers in many established positions.
It is happening right now in both white collar and blue collar industries. For example the company Ocado, a UK based online grocery retailer, has created advanced warehouses that utilise 3000+ robots to pick and pack grocery orders, which has significantly reduced labour costs.
I previously worked in logistics and I witnessed the high volume of workers involved. The large scale displacement effect of AI would produce a revolutionary change in the industry.
This is just one industry.
It is happening now everywhere. The probability is that the rate of change will only increase.
All entrepreneurs are incentivised to allocate capital towards the most efficient business processes. If it is cheaper to utilise artificial intelligence to do a task, they will utilise it.
This is a good thing.
If you lose your job it will allow you to redirect your time, energy and labour into an activity that is more productive and beneficial to society. At the same time your former employer will benefit from increased efficiency and productivity.
You can call this process creative destruction. An economic process where the old is constantly being replaced by the new, an essential process in a free, prosperous society.
If you mentally frame this process as a win-win situation it will lead to better outcomes for you, both financially and psychologically.
You may already hold this ideological position as a baseline. If you don't, you need to think about how you can position yourself in the future, in order to benefit from these exponentially unfolding economic and technological changes.
Creativity as the path forward
If many repetitive, programmable and some low-level creative tasks will be taken care of by AI in the future, we need to think about how we can provide value.
What can we provide that artificial intelligence can't?
As a human you have the creative ability to align yourself mentally towards any goal that you want to and move towards it. You can set goals, move forward and then error correct towards new goals if you obtain new information that deems it beneficial to do so.
Conversely artificial intelligence in its present state with its specialised nature, needs to be assigned a goal before it can work towards it.
There is no concept that the next frontier of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), can understand that humans cannot.
Therefore, embracing your unique perspective on topics, unique life experience, unique ability to synthesise information and your ability to align yourself towards a specific goal, will allow you to create value in a way that AI cannot.
You, through your perspective and solutions can become your own niche. You can establish a unique point of difference in the vast market of global goods and services available. Hence the recent popularisation of the concept and phrase, 'You are the niche'.
If you take this path by embracing your unique perspective and combining it with entrepreneurship, you can reduce the risk of technological creative destruction taking place in the workforce.
This path can give you the ability to create independent income as you develop the goal of becoming an entrepreneur and move towards it.
How do we achieve this? The way forward is to solve problems for people by utilising your intrinsic creativity as a human and become a deep generalist rather than a specialist.
This would involve working towards having a broad perspective and diverse range of knowledge and skills across various domains. You would be adaptable and be able to move quickly when making business decisions or pivoting.
If you are a writer but know how to edit videos, your ability to pivot to video-based content will involve less friction in the future.
To start this process you can learn multiple skills such as web design, writing, graphic design, marketing, copywriting, sales, audience building, branding, video editing, audio production, data analysis and product development.
You might have noticed these are all skills that can be learnt and performed digitally utilising the information superhighway (internet, communications networks). They are not constrained by geographical location.
This is the lowest cost, lowest friction way of getting started. Once you have made significant progress you could then branch out into the realm of physical products and brick and mortar locations if you desire.
From here, you can then take it one step further and pursue polymathic mastery, which is to go deeper and master several distinct disciplines as a process of evolution from the broad level perspective of a deep generalist.
Use your ability as a human to make connections and create value for people that AI cannot because of its specialised nature.
You most likely have knowledge and a skillset that can be shared with the world. If you don't, you can learn a new skill that can be shared with people that are just one or two steps behind you.
You don't have to be an expert to teach someone, you just need to be a little bit ahead of them.
This is the path forward.
Develop a vision for your life and use your unique creativity to provide the value that will manifest your vision.
This process will require you to think deeply about exactly what you want out of life.
It will be worth the effort.
You Will Encounter Resistance
A problem that you most likely have encountered, is that society will assign you a goal if you don't create one for yourself. The traditional education system, and the state, will be more than happy to do this for you.
Their goal is to produce a worker for their personal benefit.
It is in your best interest to create your own goals, then work towards acquiring the knowledge and skills required to achieve those goals. Not someone else's goals.
Most people lead a slave-like existence where one performs a specialised task for the rest of their life.
You could be in this situation right now, and be unconscious of the fact that it is slowly destroying your life.
I was in this position for many years, but I was very conscious of the fact that it was destroying my life. I had no clear mental path as to how to escape it. It took a complete re-examination and re-organisation of my life to get to where I am today, which is a hugely improved position with clear goals that have been set.
Creative destruction in a psychological sense perhaps.
My advice is to avoid being a slave now and into the future, unless you are very aware of your specialised position in society and are at peace with it. But be aware, if you stray from the pack and choose your own path, there will likely be intense resistance and ridicule from the people around you if they learn what you are doing.
Like crabs trying to pull their crab friend back into the bucket, as the courageous crab tries to escape certain death.
This process will require courage and decisive action.
If you care what people think about how you live your life, you will need to let go of that.
You need to embrace your creativity to become a deep generalist and pursue multi-disciplinary competence.
You must learn how to learn.
The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. – Naval Ravikant
Become a V2 renaissance man.
Embrace radical personal responsibility, the pursuit of skill acquisition and step into the unknown.
Because no-one else will do it for you and your future prosperity requires it.
The One Person Business Model
The one person business is the model of the future that will give you the ability to create income for yourself, on your own terms by utilising your unique ability to synthesise information.
You start by solving problems in your own life through researching, implementing and testing potential solutions.
You develop a personal system that solves a problem for you.
You build an audience by creating content around this personal system and your interests.
You build a product or service around successful content topics.
This is the one person business in a nutshell.
It will allow you to prosper in the future entrepreneurial landscape and protect you from the threat of AI.
The simple framework:
Niche → Brand → Audience → Newsletter → Free product → Paid product → Landing page → Traffic and sales.
You can take these steps to start:
Choose three topics that you are interested in.
Create content around that knowledge, then release the content on a platform that suits your topic of interest. For example - Substack is popular for investment newsletters, X is popular for entrepreneurship, Youtube is popular for travel and Pinterest is popular for interior design.
Identify your topics that are performing best and double down on those topics. Pivot and try different topics if you feel it will be beneficial.
Develop a 'brand aesthetic' and consider how you present yourself to the world.
Build your audience through consistent release of content.
Reach out and communicate with like-minded people in your niche.
Write an email newsletter, create a way for your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, then distribute it. You could use a platform like Mailerlite or Substack. By acquiring the email addresses of your audience, it protects you from the risk of being de-platformed from any social media account. If this happens you will still have a way to reach your audience.
Build a small free or paid digital product or service.
Build a large digital product around the same topic. If you see interest and positive results from your small product, this is a positive sign that there will be interest in your larger product which will take more time to create. If there is no interest in the smaller product it may not be worth building the larger product.
Create a landing page where customers can view your products and buy them. Utilise your brand aesthetic here.
Direct audience traffic to your landing page. Provide links in your content or consider paid advertising if suitable for your niche.
Explore different avenues of monetisation such as software as a service, paid subscription newsletters or physical products once you have established an audience and have enough startup capital.
Essentially, you will focus on brand, content and product.
Brand - How you present yourself online.
Content - How you distribute your knowledge to other people.
Product - A personal system that you have tested which will help people solve a problem.
Process Notes
Build while learning. Instead of watching endless tutorials to learn how to build a project, just outline the project and start building it. A project can be a landing page, a budget, an email marketing campaign, a health plan, any task that will move you towards your vision. If you hit a roadblock, research how to perform the specific task that needs to be done and complete it. This will save precious time and ingrain the teachings in your mind.
Stack failures, this is where you learn the most. By failing, knowledge is acquired and new goals and opportunities will reveal themselves. You can now pivot toward these new goals if desired.
If you need time and motivation, you can implement geographical arbitrage by relocating to another country with a lower cost of living. It is a form of tactical stress that will motivate you to get work done. This is the path that I took.
If you don't have the financial means to do this and are currently an employee, you can discipline yourself to set aside the time to complete one hour of highly focussed work per day on your one person business.
Embrace radical self-education.
Buy courses, watch tutorials on Youtube, read books, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, find mentors and read high quality newsletters from creators you respect and gain value from. Do whatever it takes to acquire the knowledge that will move you towards your vision.
If you are doing something that does not sustainably move you towards your vision, this is to be treated as a distraction.
This process will take time. Possibly years so you will need to be ok with this.
Don't quit.
Develop A Foundational Economic Understanding Of The World
I am big on this.
Once you have built an income from your one person business, you can now use your increased learning skills to develop a foundational economic understanding of the world. Once developed, you can then start to invest your excess capital to grow or protect your wealth.
Read books, listen to podcasts, listen to thousands of hours of content from people who you respect and are more knowledgeable than you are.
I can recommend the books ‘Economics in one lesson’, by Henry Hazlitt and ‘Market Wizards’, by Jack D. Schwager as a starting point.
In addition to understanding economics and the mechanics of financial markets, this pursuit will help shape your philosophical core, and inform your views and positions on morality and ethics.
This will also help you in business.
You will be surprised at how an understanding of economics will shape your views of what constitutes good and evil.
Study the mechanics of the financial markets, choose asset classes, become a market participant and wisely invest your newly acquired capital for protection and/or growth as you see fit.
If you would like to know more about the one person business model, I recommend checking out Dan Koe, who writes brilliantly on this topic and also many more related topics.
I have a long way to go with my own one person business and have not reached the goals I aspire to yet. I will continue to document my journey in this newsletter.
Thank you very much for reading.
Best of luck.
-Shernon
*Not to be construed as financial advice.
