Turn Books Into Skills With AI Using Shu Ha Ri Mastery Method

If you're one of the wonderful dinosaurs who still read books, then you will know this problem, right? We reach for books

because there's something we want to improve. There's something in our lives that we're doing that we're not getting

the optimal results for. So, we reach for a book and try to plug that gap. And of course, you know, we if if you feel

comfortable, you know, you highlight, you write into the margins and you're understanding the new concepts. All very

exciting while you're reading book. But once the book is shut, number one, it's really difficult to remember what we

actually read, which is why I started using Obsidian, taking notes, all of this good stuff. That's not what we're

going to talk about today, though, because there's a second problem that's even bigger. Just because you can

remember what's inside the book doesn't mean you use it. And learning doesn't happen until we change our behavior,

right? So, if the behavior still stays the same, then there was no real learning going on. It was just

intellectual uh fantasizing of a better world. Okay. So, how are we going to combat this? I will share with you how I

use books, turn them into skills so that I can use it inside my AI and let it make sure that I practice how to use my

book. It is not enough just to extract the frameworks, the learnings from the book itself. That is like the

preparatory step. It's not even the first step. Once we have the frameworks, we have to figure out how to apply it.

So, I'll show you how I set up my skill in order to be able to do that. First of all, let's talk about the abstraction

problem and how useful ideas go to die. Lots of people say, well, you know, it should be pretty easy to get AI to use a

book's idea, right? You just, you know, take the book, you know, upload it as a PDF or something like that. Or better

yet, you know, if it's a famous book, then the AI already knows about the book, so you don't even need to give it

anything. or even if it doesn't know just give it a summary of books. I mean there's so many services that do that.

So why don't you use that and then just tell it hey turn it into a skill and I can use it technically yes but let's

talk about the abstraction problem and why the skill that you get at the end is not going to be useful. First of all,

right, the idea came from a person who went through experience and they had the idea, the expertise which they

abstracted into book form. Right? So this is already the first level of abstraction.

Okay, now it's in a form that's easy to read. So that's a quite helpful version of abstraction. But if you use a

summary, so now you know from however many pages, 200 pages and now it is a small one pager with the key frameworks

or ideas. Then the problem is you compress it so much that you lose some of the nuance, some of the examples,

right? We don't just learn from abstract concepts. We need to see how it plays out specifically. So already we lose

that layer. All right, no problem. Then the next thing is how about we abstract it further right now let's you know tell

ChBT claude whoever it is that you use hey you know for this book help me extract what's important and then help

me create a skill. So by the time you're creating your skill, you are taking an abstraction of an abstraction of an

abstraction of an idea, right? We are going what like four levels of abstractions. So it's not surprising

that at the end we get something very average, right? Something very vague, something that doesn't have nuance

because we were we keep on stripping it of nuance so that it's easier for us to digest. And specifically for AI, we

don't want to do this because AI is really good at digesting information. So we don't want to give it abstraction of

abstraction. So instead what we'll do is to make sure that we give the AI the right context so

that it can understand three things. And then talk about the three things. The three things we want a successful skill

to do is number one, we want to know when to use the method. Okay? Whether it's changing how we do something or

whether it's changing how we think. We we need to know when to use it. Not just whenever, right? We want to be specific

about why did you reach out to that book the first place. What is that action that you want to change? What is that

behavior you want to change? Make sure you know what that is and when that happens. Right? Because the second thing

is how to make the change right here. And I'm focusing on the change because

remember learning doesn't happen until we have some sort of behavior change. So it's not just hey let me read this book

for fun. I mean you can read it for fun of course but if the goal is to get a better result for whatever the behavior

it is that you're trying to change then you have to think about okay so how does that lead to the change and that is

dependent on the method that's in the book. Then the third thing is to record and review what happened. We need to

know what happened at the end. Right? Again because our goal is on the behavior change. We have to know okay

once I implemented the method then did it actually contribute to a change? If it's changed, what has changed? Is it

changed for the better, change for the worse? Something completely different. I need to rethink about what is what is

this thing that I'm trying to work on? All of that is important to know. So what we're doing here is really to have

a situation a method a new method from the book and I mean book can be podcast YouTube video

whatever it is a new method which leads to a new action right because we're making that change and then see and

review the result and what you're doing here is creating a feedback feedback

loop. And if you remember from this video earlier on, I talked about the mental models that we want to use now.

Now that we have AI, it's because this loop helps us and helps the AI get smarter, right? Before there's so much

going on, okay? You know, we can't always create a feedback loop and humans are slow to respond. Whatever it is,

feedback loops are a lot more difficult. But now that you have AI in your life, it is good at tracking things. It is

good at remembering things. It is good at surfacing things for you. So, you want to be able to more consciously

create feedback loops so that you can learn, hey, what's worked? What hasn't worked? Should I pivot my strategy?

Should I stay with the same strategy? Should I improve the strategy? What should I do? We only know if we have a

feedback loop that gives us the evidence over time. Here I want to introduce a concept that specifically feeds into the

feedback loop and why we need a feedback loop when we're trying to change a behavior. It actually comes from

Japanese martial arts and tea ceremony of how do you master a skill? But in that sense, it was how do you master the

art of tea ceremony or how do you master your martial arts and there is a three-step process to it called shuhadi.

Now shu these are step one, step two, and step three. So let's go one at a time. I talked about it in this video as

well, but I will break it down here. Number one, shu for those of you who understand Japanese or even Chinese. Shu

means to let's say obey. Okay? Meaning that whatever your teacher, your sensei, you know, tells you, hey, this is how

you do tea ceremony, for example, you just do it. You follow the framework, you follow their method, and you just

learn how to do this thing. And I'll come back and talk about why this is really important. And most people try to

skip this step. Number two, once you know how things work, then you can go, huh? And this means to break which means

okay not only is your sensei's framework interesting now you can explore the edges of the framework right maybe is

you take another sensei's approach and see what are the things that overlap what are the things that are slightly

new can I push the boundaries of what I know you start to customize and kind of integrate this learning and start to

break away from just whatever your first sensei said and Try to see what else is available and match your reality. All

right. Then step three is D. So this is to move away. And what we're trying to do here is okay, you've learned from

your original sense. You've learned other frameworks and you start to see okay the boundaries I can push them. If

I push them in all of these ways, not only it that do things still work, things might even be better. And based

on all of my experience, all of the expertise I've built up over time, I can actually come up with my own framework,

right? So I can come up with my own style of doing something because of my philosophy, because of my strength and

weaknesses, because of my experience, all of these good things. And the problem is that we try to we try to skip

skip this step shoe of just simply a bang. I was actually having a conversation with Christo also an

awesome YouTuber if you don't know who he is check him out and he you know he brought up so what's the different thing

that separates people who succeed and those who don't is those who succeed just follow advice and just do it they

do the thing that works it doesn't mean that whatever you know their mentor says or whoever the expert says is 100%

correct but what they do is okay this person has more expertise than me they say, you know, do step one to five. I'm

just going to do it and then I can based on my newly gained experience and the data and the evidence decide what to do

next, right? And I probably need to do it a few times before I actually have credible data evidence to show does this

thing work. They're not trying to do all three things at once. I'll give you a classic example. There's a book called

the onepage marketing plan by Alan Deb. Got to meet him the other day. It was really cool. I really like his book. But

when I when I started my business, you know, I started with this book as kind of like a bible to marketing. But

because I had no experience marketing, I made this mistake of mixing up all of these three levels. So in his book, it's

very simple, right? there's these nine things inside the onepage marketing plan that you have to fill out and he tells

you how to fill them out. You just do it. But me, you know, not having experience, I was like, "Okay, great.

There are these nine things." But then, you know, secretly I'm not comfortable doing some of them. So, I was making up

excuses why I'm not going to do them now. And then I was saying, well, but then you know, companies like Apple,

they don't do it in the way that he was describing. And so I was trying to copy some of the things that Apple was doing.

And I was just such a mess. You know, he has a great plan. I did not follow it. I tried to customize it. I tried to mix it

up. And in the end, I was getting nowhere because I in my mind, I was still unsure about what it is I need to

do. And once you start to customize, you can customize all sorts of ways, right? Apple does it different to Nike, who

does it different to Patagonia. You just get lost in all the possible choices that you can make. So I learned the hard

way, you know, just just come back to this. Start here. Start with shoe, right? Pick a book that you like, you

know, the onepage marketing plan. You sit down and you do the work. Even if you feel like, okay, I have a better way

of doing this, you know, for forget it for one second and just follow the method. Follow the method. Do it a few

times to see with your own eyes on the results, right? We talked about it here. What actually happened before you start

to change things, right? This is how scientific experiments work. You're not going to change all the variables at

once and try to see if something works or not. You have to change it one at a time. So, let's have a base. Let's do

the thing that the expert suggested, the frameworks that are in the book just as a base to get us started. And then once

we have enough evidence inside our feedback loop, we can get to the break. We can get to the move away. With that

in mind, let's now bring in AI because what AI is really good at doing is doing emotionless

support. And that is crucial, right? Learning is actually a very emotional experience because we're getting into

uncertainty, right? We're getting into the unknown. We are brushing up against our ego of, you know, maybe we're not

doing something right or there's some fear around what if I can never learn these skills. So, it's actually a very

emotional experience. But AI doesn't have emotion and we should use it to its advantage. Which

means it can just guide us through the learning process without us relying on staying disciplined and staying rational

all the time inside our skill. These are the things that we need. Okay. First of all, we need to articulate what is the

situation where we are going to use this new method inside the book, inside the podcast, inside the YouTube video,

whatever it is. And then we're going to take action. And then we are going to let the agent record our results so that

we can have a feedback loop and analyze this over time and see any patterns. Now let me switch my screen to codeex so

we can build the skill together. All right, let's build a skill. I'll show you two ways of doing this. There are

different ways, but these two ways are going to be domino depending on whether you take notes. Okay. So, first of all,

the no note takingaking version is just you tell your agent that you want to build a skill. And by the way, this

works in codec, it works in cloud code, works in all agents. Let's just take this as an example. Okay, based on the

book, the onepage marketing plan. And the situation when I want to use this skill is whenever I am doing any

marketing activities inside my business. I wanted to refer back to the nine grid onepage marketing plan. This way I can

make sure that I have the correct target audience. I'm tracking them. I'm nurturing them. I I'm doing worldclass

delivery for them. uh the method you can find this on the internet since it's a well-known book and uh also help me

track two things number one is did I follow the method that Alan Dib shared whenever I am

creating my marketing documents and number two is what's the result so let's start from there. All right. So, what I

did was just to tell my agent what it is I want. And by the way, as you see, you know, this is not a complicated prompt.

I'm just making it up on the spot. If you use agents as opposed to the chat version, you know, like here instead of

codecs, if you use chat GPT, chat GPT needs better prompting, but if you use agents, prompt is less important.

Context is everything with agents. Uh, so a prompt is fine. Let's put it through and see what codec says. All

right, here is what Codeex came up with. It built the skill onepage marketing plan and it will review marketing work

against Gaz Allen's nine grid journey. So, let's take a look if it has the source of truth. Here is are the phases

that Codeex has created for me, which is great. I'm just taking a look to see if they match what's inside the book, and

they do. This is great. And it has a question each focus on the decision which is really powerful. By the way, I

will just mention this again. If you use only the chat version, so you know on claude it's like you use claude instead

of claude codework or claude code. If you're on chatbt, you use chatbt instead of chatbt work or chatbt or codeex then

I highly recommend you just just switching over to give this a try because if you've done the same exercise

inside the chat version, it's not going to be able to create documents like this where it's hyperfocused and it

understands your intent as well. So yes, just a small plug for try AI agents if you haven't already. It is not

technical. Especially if you're nontechnical, don't worry. It's not just for coding. I'm showing you everything

inside agents. And I Anyway, this is I'm going off topic, but highly recommend that you try agents because you can

really see what AI is able to do because not only did it create the decisions that I need to make, but also the

minimum evidence in the marketing record. Because what I did was I I told it to make sure that

it records what it is that I'm doing, right? So the agent understands in order for it to do that, it needs to know what

to check for. And so for each of the quadrants is created, okay, these are all of the things I need to check for in

message, the core message, offer mechanism, proof, objection, CTA, and claims boundary. Okay. So, if you

haven't read the book, you just thought, "Okay, someone recommended like Vicki recommended the books. I'm going to use

it. I haven't read the book yet." You know, this is where you can start. Just a simple prompt in order to get your

agent to set up a skill that you can use and see if it works. For example, I will just give it a sales page of mine for a

system thinking course. And let's just see what it does against this skill. Right. First, it'll treat this as a

test. I didn't even say anything. I just gave it a a URL. It understands what I'm doing. So, let's see what it comes up

with. All right. Let's see what it found. Okay. So, it took a look. It followed much of Allen's method.

However, cell six is broken. Let's see. Check out currently render zero. Oh, this is actually I have checked this

before, but doesn't seem to be a problem. Not sure what happened. Maybe it's a browsing issue, but I can ask it

to actually take a look. Not sure. Double check. Okay, while it's checking, let's take a look at the rest. So, okay,

all of these one and two are clear. Partial for media. The source attribution and UTM

persistence are unverified. Yes, actually this is missing. So, I need to set it up. Great. Uh, leak capture,

weight list, and checkout capture exist in the plan. This page has no path for interested non- buyers. True. I haven't

really thought about that. Okay. So, I can update the sales page for that lead nurture. I've got the sequences ready.

Sales conversion. Okay. It was it's reading something weird. And is actually rechecking. So, hopefully it will be

able to correct that. Customer experience. Well, this is now coming to delivery and uh my agent doesn't have

access to [snorts] the back end of when I fulfill the source. So, I have my promises. It just

needs to take a look at what's happening. Okay. So, yes, is correct. Okay, no problem. Then it'll be able to

update this lifetime value. Okay. Referral missing. True. I don't currently have anything for referral. So

this is as you can see as a skill it is so helpful and particularly because I am asking for it to track the results it

knew to not just tell me hey do you have a target market do you have the message but it's looking at what are the

decisions I'm making and what is checking against super specific and that's the important

thing we don't want to abstract away what are the things that we're checking for right so this is good to know all

All right, great. Okay, so we'll tell it checkout is working fine. So update your analysis. So while it's doing that, we

know that we have the situation, right? We have the method, we took the action, and now we are recording the results.

I've just done a launch for that course, complexity to clarity, recently. So once I have the results, I'm going to come

back here and I will tell it what happened. So it'll be able to track it. And because it pointed out specific

things I need to fix, like adding the UTM parameters, adding, you know, interested non- buyers, where do they

go? Having all of these, then I will be able to go next time when I do a launch. Start to have more evidence of, hey, you

know, these are all of the things I've improved. What happened the next time? Did it improve? All right. As a bonus, I

will show you if you take notes inside Obsidian or whatever your note-taking system is, you can make the skill even

better by giving it better context. So, let me show you what I mean. Context is key when building skills, right? As I

was mentioning here, this kind of specific things that you're looking for already improves the likelihood that

your skill will be much more useful. Now the thing is every single individual is unique right let's say we all read

this book maybe you have experience in branding maybe someone else has experience in accounting maybe someone

else has experience in product and I have experience in something else and so even though the method is the same where

our knowledge gaps are and why we find this method helpful will be different so bringing that context to highly

customize the skill to help you do the things that you're not good at or the things that you want to improve on. So

what I would do in that case is once we have this result here, I will ask it take a look at my zetto casten and find

my notes related to Allen and the onepage marketing plan. help me see where are my knowledge gaps based on my

notes and what I would like to work on so that this skill can be more specific and walk me through how to uh make the

marketing plan more effective. So what I've done here is I asked it to look at my note-taking system is called

zettocasten the folder is called zettocasten inside my obsidian. So codeex is able to then go into my folder

look for what are the notes that I have related to this book so that it can start to analyze for patterns like what

are the things that I I keep on highlighting and noting right that can indicate a knowledge gap so let's see

what codeex finds and we can go from there and as you can see it's already found some patterns that I'm focusing

strongly on focus leverage direct response nurture and the nine boxes and you'll See, you know, there are so many

different concepts in here. But to me, what I want to work work on is focus leverage are two very important things

that aren't necessarily visible here, right? So that's why we want to if you have good high quality notes on books,

then you want to be able to bring that in and in an easy way, right? Like I'm not going through all the notes to say,

"Hey, here are all the things that you should remember agent skill, right? I'm getting the agent to do the work for me

because I've already done my part of the job, which is use my judgment, pick out what's important, document them, take

notes, process the information, see how much more detail it can give you once it has access to high quality context. So

it says, I've analyzed here are your knowledge gaps. Right? Again, getting more specific, which is good. The

biggest overall gap is of course the bridge from learning to application is which is exactly why we have this skill.

That's perfect. It says okay you haven't recorded these things actually I have it in another folder so I will share that

with it as well. And then it says okay here's how the skill is going to be more effective. It is going to ask uh on five

decisions. I love these. Okay. So what is the current constraint? It leaves sales or delivery and retention because

in the book itself it breaks up the nine grids into three sections which is le basically leads sales and delivery. So

knowing what to focus on already it just doesn't apply just the nine grids by itself but it knows to have focus. That

is key. Okay perfect. And which one grid cell is causing us. But see, now we're not just applying the skill, we're

actually doing some diagnostics with it, right? And that is going to be really helpful because I'm not starting my

business from scratch. So, I have all of the nine grids, you know, pretty much set up. But which one is holding me

back? I need to be more clear on that. Which goes back to what I was saying about the 64,

right? What 4% of the causes is going to give me the 64% of the impact? I need to find that. Okay. What exact customer

transition should happen? All right, which audience, offer, channel and CT are we focusing on? Right, helping me

focus because you know in my notes I was focus is a big area for me. What are we deliberately not solving yet? So see how

this part is taking my notes on the book and understanding what am I prioritizing and then is making it super concrete for

me to apply those learnings. Awesome. Okay. And then it is also evaluating each grid cell for three levels

understanding decision and measurement evidence. And then it also found my business specific constraints which is

great blah blah blah. So now really the skill is being updated so that I am focusing on applying the concepts in the

book. The agent is doing all of the grunt work, all of the retrieval, all of the

design of using the knowledge so that I can apply it and build more experience as opposed to I'm doing this thing

again. Let's throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. Right now, I know every single time I'm working on

whether it's a course I'm launching or a cohort or whatever it is that I'm doing that's related to marketing, there is a

process for me to follow that comes from this book and I can actually use it. And over time, you'll start to see patterns

of how you're actually able to apply the method. Is the method effective? Which part of the method maybe is particularly

effective? which areas you might have your own expertise that you can go through it so that you can go through

Shu Ha Re and be able to apply the beautiful knowledge that's inside all of these wonderful books or whatever the uh

version the format might be. If you're wondering what is AI agents, no worries. I've got a free resource down below to

get you started because I again last time I will say this, you got to use at least try AI agents to see the power of

what it can do for you and not just stay on the chat version. So check that out below. I will see you in the next video.

Bite.