The Full Story:

Feb 12th, 2024:

We’re starting small here, but if you don’t know me, my name is Tom Beckett.

I’m a millennial, I live in beautiful Ventura, CA, I work from home at a tech startup (Hoist), I’ve had varying degrees of success founding my own companies and projects, I like to play off-brand Spikeball with my childhood friends, I have an amazing wife who I’ve been with for more than a decade, and we have a baby girl that is due any day now.

Projects by Tom is where I’m hoping to try to educate people (starting with my friends, family, and network) on how they can start to adopt tools like ChatGPT and other AI/AGI to make their lives better day-to-day – both at work, but even at home, just as I do personally.

The overwhelming majority of my friends and family are NOT currently using this stuff yet and that seems like so much missed opportunity, to me.

I first started hearing mumblings about what tools like ChatGPT could do two Novembers ago, and I’ve since experienced my own use of AI tools increase almost daily over the last year.

It’s already to the point that I don’t know what I did before I had these tools at my disposal, kinda like before the internet was what it is today, or we could look up directions on our phones. I would certainly be distraught if these AI tools disappeared tomorrow, and they’ve really only just arrived.

I feel like I’m at just the tip of the iceberg of what else I could do with them and I really want to dive deeper into it. As I do, I want to bring everyone along because this stuff continues to blow my mind every single day (I’m not exaggerating), and I know it will for you too, once you start to see more of what it can do, both the bigger picture types of things, but also the little things that help with quality of life and convenience.

With all of this AI, I see an opportunity for people across so many different disciplines being able to be more efficient and effective by using it – even really basic uses of it.

I think I’m the guy for the task too. I subscribe to many top newsletters and voices on AI, and to be honest, I probably use less than 5% of all the stuff that’s shared, and I KNOW I’m in the minority of those that are keeping up with what’s coming out and improving every week.

Maybe I can share that 5% that I think is useful, and maybe you’ll use only 5% of that. With how much is already out there and how much more is going to come out, even that would be a huge success in terms of productivity.

This stuff really is a big deal because as I’ve helped friends and family dip their toes into some of these tools, I’ve seen first-hand how they’ve become tools they now use daily, as often as Googling stuff, just as I do.

I want to help anyone with even the smallest hint of curiosity to be able to start to see the potential of all this stuff.

So that’s my manifesto.

Here are a couple of personal goals for me on this project:

• Make my content as simple and actionable as possible

• Adapt based on how my audience is resonating with my work

• Give a glimpse into my life and how I work, as I’ve kept my digital profile pretty low-key to-date

• Be willing to look and sound stupid (be vulnerable), for the purposes of learning quickly

• Focus on making an impact as quickly and effectively as possible, versus creating perfection (use the 80/20 approach)

• Leverage as much of this technology as possible to accomplish the above

I’ll add more here as it comes to mind.

If this all sounds good to you, please follow along!

Oh! You can also expect to hear me touch on these topics as well from time to time:

• Personal and Professional Development

• Productivity

• Entrepreneurship and Startups

• My journey as a New Dad