I'm new to AI · 10 hours that change everything
If you've never seriously used Claude, GPT, or any LLM tool, this is the cleanest 10 hours you can spend. It's not a course. It's a sequence: one terminology page so you stop nodding through conversations you don't understand, one essay so you know what to install first, one workflow so you can see leverage with your own eyes, one upgrade so the leverage compounds, and one frontier signal so you know why this is the year to start.
Do them in order. The order matters more than the speed. By the end you should have a meeting tool quietly producing markdown notes, a Claude install that remembers what you told it last week, and a clear sense of where the wedge is sharpest for a CEO running a $1-50M business.
This path takes about ten hours including the setup work each piece asks you to do. Read each piece carefully, then stop and install or configure before moving to the next.
What you'll have when you're done
- A working mental model of what Claude Code is and where it fits versus the consumer chat apps you've heard about.
- The CEO-grade meeting capture pipeline running (Granola → markdown), generating notes you actually want to read.
- A Claude install that holds context across sessions instead of forgetting you every login.
- One concrete reason to care about the current frontier moves, framed for an operator rather than an investor.
- A baseline of vocabulary and habit that makes every other path on this site readable.
Unlock the path
Members get the connective prose for every step · why it's here, what to look for, what you'll have when you finish. Membership is becoming one All-Access plan: every book, every course, the templates library, and the Deep Dive archive. It opens soon, and newsletter readers hear first.
The path
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1Claude CodeRead it →
Start here because everything that follows assumes you know what Claude Code is. It's not the consumer Claude.ai chat. It's a separate tool the operators on this site use as the substrate for almost everything else: memory, routines, agents, automation. Read the definition slowly. Note the difference between the chat app and the CLI tool.
After this you'll have the vocabulary to read the rest of the path without translating.
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2Granola for CEOs: the highest-ROI AI install of 2026Read it →
This is the pillar essay. Granola is the meeting tool. It records, transcribes, and summarizes every call you take · zero buttons, zero setup, no bot in the room. The argument here is that for a CEO running a real business, this is the single highest-ROI AI install you can make. Higher than Claude. Higher than anything custom. Read for the why, not the how.
After this you'll know what to install before you install anything else.
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3Granola → markdown: the foundation everyone's missingRead it →
Now the how. This is the practical foundation almost every new CEO skips: get your meeting transcripts into a folder of markdown files that downstream tools can actually read. Follow the steps. Spend the 30 minutes. The payoff isn't this workflow · it's that every workflow after this one depends on it.
After this you'll have a directory full of meeting notes that downstream Claude workflows can search, summarize, and act on.
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4Persistent memory across Claude Code sessionsRead it →
Memory is the upgrade that turns Claude from a smart chat into a tool that learns you. Without it you re-introduce yourself every session and the model can't compound. With it, the tool gets sharper every week you use it. This is the workflow that makes everything after it possible.
After this you'll have Claude holding context across sessions: your company, your voice, the projects in flight.
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5Microsoft just put OpenAI's biggest rival inside OfficeRead it →
Closer. One news item to ground you in why the timing matters now. Microsoft putting OpenAI's biggest rival inside Office isn't just a procurement story · it's the signal that AI-leverage is no longer an early-adopter game. The category is moving fast enough that a CEO who waits another six months will be reading from behind.
After this you'll have one concrete reason to stop reading and start installing.
What's next
When this path is closed, the natural next commitment is 30 Days to Real AI Leverage (Course #1 on this site). The course goes from "you've used Claude once" to "you have a working operator-grade install with three workflows that save you hours every week." If you want a curated second path before the course, try I have ChatGPT, I want real leverage for the chat-to-compounding sequence.