From Jazz to Finance: How I Used AI to Automate My Life and Retire Early

From Jazz to Finance

I grew up as a jazz musician and attended school for music. When I graduated from college, guitar in hand, I realized that the main thing I learned from school was that I did not want to work as jobbing musician. The thought of backing up other musicians had no appeal to me. I wanted to be a jazz guitarist and create my own music. The only problem with that is there is little to no opportunity to make a living playing instrumental jazz. I needed to find a way to make money and a lot of it! I was done barely making enough money to pay rent.

Fortunately, the internet made that possible. My first career was as a financial advisor, but cold calling for clients was getting in the way of my music. So, I had to find a way to use the internet to generate business.

Entrepreneurship and Automation

I started with an estate planning website and found immediate success selling insurance to help my newfound clients with their estate planning needs. I quickly realized that automation was the key to success and left my bank job to embark on a business that could largely run itself, or at least run without my constant daily attention. With the help of a small staff and my wife, I have been able to automate a large part of my life, giving me more time to focus on my passions. I have been able to tour the world as a performing musician, build a world-class recording studio, spend my entire summers at the cottage, and spend most mornings fishing on a perfectly calm lake.

AI and its Potential

With the emergence of AI and ChatGPT, I now have access to a tool that can automate tasks even further. It’s a game-changer, perhaps the biggest in history, making me feel like a company of 100. By automating tasks that I used to do myself or maintain a medium-sized staff to do so, I’ve been able to free up even more time for my music and other passions.

Examples of AI Automation

For example, I was able to automate formatting for QuickBooks by using AI to convert bank statements into CSV files. The same was true for porting company reviews from another website into a proper format. These tasks that used to take me hours, I can now complete in a matter of seconds. Another time saver was formulating a structure for the website that makes sense. In the past I had spent a lot of time organizing content, never have I been all that successful, but AI does it perfectly in seconds and lets me know what I could add to give a better experience to the users.

Retirement and AI

AI can help people retire early by literally taking over the majority of the tasks that occupy the majority of an entrepreneur’s time. AI can automate tasks such as data entry, bookkeeping, and marketing. This leaves you as an entrepreneur to focus on more strategic tasks that require your expertise. The key is simply asking yourself, “How can I get AI to do this?” There has been a solution to almost every idea I have had and AI is becoming more robust every day.

The Importance of Humanism

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I am using AI right now to help with this article. Is the AI writing this post, no! Here is how I used AI in this article. I woke up inspired. This new website is almost done. Even though it is not complete or even getting traffic from search engines people are coming to the site from previous bookmarks. “Wow” I thought to myself, look how quickly I built this with AI. Think of how much time I saved. I opened up the chat and just started writing everything I was thinking at the moment. Reminiscing about how I got here. Thinking about music, recording, the touring, and the musicians I had played with. I just wrote it all down. Then I asked chatGTP to formulate an article based on my thoughts. Seconds later I received a robotic pile of generic boring content. I tried about three more prompts but nothing was working. So I asked it to add no content and not rewrite my ideas, just organize them into a structure that makes sense. I needed structure because I was all over the place with my ideas. ChatGPT couldn’t help but to interject some robotic statements but it was close. The article was coming together. I cut and pasted the article into my text editor and removed the AI-added blurbs and with the new layout, I was quickly able to start expanding on ideas, including this one.

Conclusion

I want to make it clear that the key to using AI to help you retire early or at least feel like you have retired is to ask yourself the right questions like “How can AI do this for me?” or “What business can I create with AI as my staff?” or “How can AI help me free up my time?” Or hey, why not just ask ChatGPT? It has many great ideas that might spur your creativity.

If I piqued your interest in my music you can check it out on Spotify or Apple Music. My website is www.galenweston.org.