The Level 1 trap most people don't know they're in.
A conversation with Will Leach this week named the thing most people are missing.
Quick heads up before the story: I'm hosting a live Watering Hole session tomorrow on this topic. Free, open. Link at the bottom. Now to what happened on the show this week.
This week’s episode with Will Leach was supposed to be about behavioral science. It ended up being about AI.
Will runs MindState Group. He built a platform called Bevy that uses behavioral psychology to help enterprise marketing teams write sharper messaging. His clients pay six figures a year for it. They are exactly the kind of teams you would expect to be running ahead of everyone on AI.
Then he said something I have not stopped thinking about.
One of his clients almost forgot to renew. The platform had nearly saved his week earlier in the year by stepping in like a chief operating officer. And he had not logged in for six weeks.
Will’s diagnosis was clean. The client was not getting less value. He was overwhelmed. He had nine AI tools open in nine tabs and could not remember which one did what. So he defaulted to none of them.
That is the pattern I see everywhere right now.
People are not drowning in AI because the tools are bad. They are drowning because they are stuck at Level 1. They never crossed the threshold where AI stops being a chat window and starts being a system.
I spent most of last year stuck there too. I treated it like Google. Open a tab, type a question, copy the answer, close the tab. Thirty good answers, zero compounding. Every conversation started from scratch because every conversation was a stranger.
Then about a year ago I built my first Project in ChatGPT. Loaded the context once. Wrote the instructions once. Came back the next day and the thing remembered who I was, what I worked on, and how I think.
Not a better prompt. Not a better model. The system itself.
That was Level 2. And once I felt the difference, I could not unsee it.
There are five levels.
Intern. Assistant. Coworker. Team. Factory. White belt to black belt, if you prefer the dojo version. Each one is a different relationship with the tool, and each one unlocks something the previous level could not touch. You climb when you are ready, not before. But you cannot climb if no one ever shows you the staircase exists.
That is why I am running a live session on this Friday.
The Bullhorns and Bullseyes Watering Hole is free. It is open. I am going to walk through the five levels, name the move that takes you from one to the next, and show what a Level 2 setup actually looks like on a screen. No theory disconnected from practice. Just the work.
I am doing this because of conversations like the one with Will. Smart, well-resourced people are losing weeks to tool fatigue. Other smart, well-resourced people are doing five times the output with calmer minds. The difference is not talent. It is not budget. It is whether someone showed them the staircase.
If you are still typing one question at a time into a chat tab, this session is for you.
If you have a Project or two running but you can feel that something bigger is sitting just out of reach, this session is for you.
If you are already running agents and orchestrating teams, you probably do not need it. Send it to someone who does.
The Watering Hole — Weekly Live Q&A Friday May 15, 1:00 PM EST
Register here:
It is live this week. I will share the recording with subscribers afterward if you cannot make it, but the live conversation is where the questions get answered.
See you Friday.
Curtis
P.S. The Will Leach episode is live now on the B&B feed if you want the full conversation. The AI thread runs through the back half. Worth the listen.