🤖 Only 6 percent feel confident

Hi there,

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from a tool that can do anything. You open it, the cursor blinks, and the sheer number of possibilities is somehow worse than having no options at all. That is not a technology problem. That is a blank-page problem, and it is older than any of us.

By the end of this, you will:

Something in the numbers surprised me.

Pew Research found this year that 37 percent of adults aged 50 to 64 use ChatGPT, and 19 percent of those 65 and older. Real numbers. People are already in the door.

Then the second figure, from that same older group: only 6 percent of adults 65 and older say they feel extremely or very confident using it.

Set those two side by side. Among people 65 and older, 19 in every 100 use ChatGPT, and only 6 feel any good at it. Which means most people in there are quietly assuming everyone else understands something they do not.

AARP found the same shape from a different angle. Their measure is broader – generative AI of any kind, among adults 50 and over – and it went from 18 percent in 2024 to 30 percent in 2025. The concerns they hear most are trust, privacy, and data security. Not difficulty.

I think the confidence gap comes from how the thing is presented. You are handed an empty box that can supposedly do anything, and "anything" is not a task. Nobody feels competent facing "anything."

There is a story about Kodak I find useful here. In 1975, one of their engineers built the first digital camera. Clunky, black and white, pictures stored on a cassette tape. He showed his bosses expecting excitement. They told him not to mention it to anyone.

Kodak had spent decades perfecting film, and a camera needing no film threatened the business paying everyone's salary. So they patented it and quietly set it aside. Competitors sold digital cameras through the eighties and nineties while Kodak protected what it already had. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

The part that stays with me is that Kodak did not miss the future. They invented it. What they could not do was let go of the fear that something new would hurt the thing that already worked.

The tool is rarely the scary part. What it might mean is the scary part.

Give it one job. Not a topic. A job, with a finished thing at the end.

Open ChatGPT and paste in the wording below. People call this a prompt, which just means the instruction you hand it. Fill in your own blank:

I spent years doing ____. I want to explain one small part of it to somebody who has never done it. Ask me five questions, one at a time, to work out which part to explain. Then wait for my answer before asking the next one.

Three things make that wording work. It gives ChatGPT a starting point from your life. It gives it a finished shape to aim at. And "one at a time, wait for my answer" stops the wall of text that makes people close the tab.

Then answer the five questions honestly. That is the whole exercise. Fifteen minutes.

If you do it, you will finish with one narrow thing you could explain to one person. Not a business. Not a plan. One explainable thing, which is the only foundation anything else gets built on.

If you do not, ChatGPT stays what it currently is for most people: a thing you have an account for and a vague sense you have not really used yet.

On Tuesday I mentioned a free tool arriving Saturday, What You Could Teach. It asks the same kind of questions as the exercise above, for the days when you would rather not type them out yourself.

There is also a short course behind it called A List of Your Own, about building an email list without paying for ads. The first three lessons are free. If you want the rest after that, it is seventeen dollars, one time. I am still writing the final lessons, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Both arrive Saturday. Nothing to do about either today.

If you tried it, reply with one word: the subject ChatGPT landed on. Just the word.

If you did not get to it, that is genuinely fine. It will keep.

Talk soon,
Bob

A quick tip from my place – the one phone setting that makes everything easier to read. No sales in it.