🐘 How Do You Eat an AI Elephant? One Problem at a Time

Some folks don’t need an AI class.

They need to figure out how they’re going to pay the electric bill.

They need to answer a letter they don’t understand. They need to find another job. They need to get somebody to call them back. They need to figure out what’s wrong with the washing machine, what to cook for supper, what that doctor meant, why their truck is making that noise, or how they’re supposed to fill out a form apparently designed by somebody who has never met an ordinary human being.

And into the middle of all that, here we come hollering:

“You need to learn artificial intelligence!”

Well, bless our hearts.

That’s a little like walking up to somebody whose house is on fire and handing them a brochure about the history of municipal water systems.

They don’t need a lecture.

They need a hose.

🐘 How Do You Eat an Elephant?

We’ve all heard the old saying:

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

It sounds silly until you’re standing in front of your own elephant.

Mine weighed about 400 pounds.

Not figuratively.

Literally.

When you’ve got that much weight to lose, the destination is so far away that it almost becomes meaningless.

You can do everything right today and look in the mirror tomorrow and see the same fellow staring back at you.

You can do it right for a week and barely notice anything.

You can make real progress for months while still looking at an enormous problem.

Sometimes the finish line is so far away that measuring yourself against the finish line becomes discouraging.

So eventually you learn something.

You don’t lose 400 pounds today.

You make today’s decision.

Then tomorrow you make tomorrow’s decision.

And somewhere along the way, all those decisions start adding up.

Life works much the same way.

🔥 Most People Aren’t Living in a Classroom

We talk about artificial intelligence as though everybody has an extra Tuesday afternoon available to study it.

“Learn prompting.”

“Learn agents.”

“Learn automation.”

“Learn large language models.”

“Learn workflows.”

Meanwhile, somebody is sitting at the kitchen table wondering whether the checkbook and the electric bill can peacefully coexist until Friday.

That’s the person I’m interested in.

Because that person may benefit from artificial intelligence more than almost anybody else.

But we’re teaching it backward.

Before we ask people to learn AI, maybe AI ought to earn the right to be learned.

🙏 Cry Out to the AI God of Your Choice

So here’s my grand, sophisticated artificial intelligence training program.

Ready?

When something aggravates you today, pull out your phone or computer and cry out to the AI god of your choice.

ChatGPT.

Claude.

Gemini.

Copilot.

Whatever electronic oracle you’ve invited into your life.

Then tell it:

“Here’s what’s happening. Help me figure out what to do next.”

That’s it.

No certification.

No three-ring binder.

No 14-module online course with a smiling fellow standing beside a whiteboard.

No quiz at the end.

Bring it today’s problem.

✉️ Don’t Understand the Letter? Start There.

Suppose an insurance company sends you three pages of words apparently harvested from a legal dictionary during a thunderstorm.

Take a picture.

Give it to AI.

Say:

“Explain this to me in ordinary English. What are they telling me, what do they want from me, and what should I do next?”

Congratulations.

You just learned AI.

Not all of it.

One bite.

💼 Need Work? Take Another Bite.

Maybe your problem today is employment.

You don’t need a six-week course on artificial intelligence.

You might need to say:

“Here’s my work history. Help me turn it into a résumé for this job.”

Then:

“Pretend you’re interviewing me for this position. Ask me one question at a time.”

That’s another bite.

🔧 Something Broke? Another Bite.

Your mower won’t start.

Your Wi-Fi quit working.

Your washing machine sounds like somebody dumped a coffee can full of bolts into it.

Tell AI what happened.

Take a picture of the model number.

Describe the symptoms.

Ask:

“Help me troubleshoot this from the simplest possibility to the most expensive one.”

Another bite.

💵 Money Is Tight? Another Bite.

Maybe you’ve got $600 and $900 worth of problems.

That is a fairly common branch of mathematics in America.

Tell AI:

“These are the bills I owe, these are their due dates, this is the money I have, and this is when I get paid again. Help me think through the tradeoffs.”

It may not magically put another $300 in the bank.

But sometimes the first useful thing anybody can give you is clarity.

Another bite.

🏪 Running a Little Business? Another Bite.

Maybe you’re a plumber, roofer, carpenter, cleaner, mechanic, hairdresser, farmer, handyman, restaurant owner or somebody selling tomatoes, rabbit cages, firewood or homemade jam.

You know your work.

You don’t necessarily know marketing.

Tell AI:

“I do this kind of work around Dunlap. These are the customers I want. Here’s what makes me different. Write a Facebook post that sounds like a real local person instead of a big corporation.”

Now you’ve used artificial intelligence to help your business.

Another bite.

🧠 The Blank Screen Is the Enemy

People think they have to know the perfect thing to ask.

They don’t.

You can literally tell AI:

“I don’t know what to ask you. Here’s my problem. Ask me questions until you understand it.”

That’s one of the most powerful sentences ordinary people can learn.

You don’t have to know the answer.

You don’t even have to know the question.

You just have to know what’s bothering you.

🗣️ And You Don’t Have to Type It

This may matter more than all the fancy AI training in the world.

Talk to it.

We’re country people.

We’ve been solving problems by talking about them on porches, in pickup trucks, at kitchen tables and across fence lines since long before anybody invented a computer.

Artificial intelligence finally makes the computer work a little more like that.

You can say:

“I’ve got a customer who owes me $450. He’s three weeks late. He’s also sent me a lot of business over the years, and I don’t want to make him mad. Help me write a text asking him about the money.”

That’s an excellent prompt.

You didn’t study prompting.

You just explained the situation like you would to another human being.

🌱 Progress You Can’t See Is Still Progress

This is where my 400-pound problem comes back into the story.

Some changes are too large to see while you’re standing inside them.

If you’re staring at a 400-pound goal, losing a pound doesn’t seem like much.

But you can’t lose 400 pounds without first losing one.

Then another.

Then another.

The same is true when somebody feels technologically left behind.

You don’t turn a frightened beginner into an AI expert on Tuesday night.

You help them solve Tuesday night’s problem.

Wednesday brings another one.

So does Thursday.

Pretty soon something interesting happens.

The person who once said:

“I don’t know anything about this AI stuff.”

starts saying:

“I wonder if AI could help me with this?”

That sentence changes everything.

🚜 That’s When the Tool Becomes a Tool

A hammer doesn’t require you to study hammer theory.

A tractor doesn’t ask whether you understand the internal combustion engine before it’ll pull a plow.

A calculator doesn’t demand that you understand semiconductor manufacturing before it’ll divide 147 by 12.

Useful technology eventually disappears into the work.

Artificial intelligence needs to become the same thing.

Not a mysterious new religion.

Not something owned by Silicon Valley.

Not a subject reserved for programmers and college graduates.

A tool.

One more tool sitting in the shed.

🧰 Six Things to Say When You Don’t Know What to Say

If I were going to teach somebody artificial intelligence on an index card, I’d probably write these six sentences:

• 🟢 Explain this to me.
• 🔵 Help me do this.
• 🟡 Give me some options.
• 🟠 What am I missing?
• 🟣 Ask me questions so you can help me.
• 🔴 What’s the first thing I should do?

That’s enough to begin.

You don’t need to understand models, tokens, context windows, APIs or agents.

Those things may come later.

First, get a win.

🏔️ Don’t Measure Yourself Against the Mountain

This may be true far beyond artificial intelligence.

Sometimes we’re defeated because we’re measuring today’s effort against the entire size of the problem.

Lose 400 pounds.

Build a business.

Get out of debt.

Learn computers.

Fix your health.

Raise children.

Care for aging parents.

Change careers.

Rebuild a community.

Those are elephants.

If you stare at the whole elephant long enough, you’ll convince yourself there’s no point taking the first bite.

But life isn’t usually changed by solving the entire problem.

It’s changed by solving today’s piece of it.

❤️ Maybe AI Doesn’t Need to Change Your Life Today

That’s the pitch I’d make to somebody who is already overwhelmed.

I’m not asking you to become an artificial intelligence expert.

I’m not asking you to reorganize your life.

I’m not asking you to buy an expensive computer.

I’m not even asking you to believe all the wonderful things people say AI is going to do someday.

I’m asking something much smaller.

What’s giving you trouble today?

Tell an AI about it.

See if it can help.

If it does, remember that.

Tomorrow, take another bite.

The next day, take another.

You may not see yourself changing.

You may not feel more technologically sophisticated.

You may not realize how much you’ve learned.

That’s okay.

I know something about working on problems so large you can’t see the progress.

Sometimes you don’t need to see the whole journey.

You just need to make today’s decision.

So when life drops another problem on the kitchen table tomorrow morning, cry out to the AI god of your choice.

Tell it what hurts.

Tell it what’s confusing.

Tell it what you’re trying to accomplish.

Then ask:

“What’s the first thing we should do?”

And take another bite.

🐘