Transcript

YouTube English auto-captions.

I want you to do something for me before we start. I want you to open up your notes app. Maybe it's Apple Notes, notepad on Windows, right now. And I'll wait. And I want you to scroll down. Actually look to see what's in there. I bet maybe you've got it a half-written title, a couple of screenshots that you swore you'd use. Maybe you've got a voice memo that you labeled idea, but you don't know what the context is all about. Perhaps it's a follow-up that you never sent. And buried somewhere in that pile, there's probably a real business opportunity that you forgot existed. That's not a notes app. That's a graveyard. And here's the uncomfortable part. Some of what's buried in there, it isn't random. Some of it is money. And I know because it happened to me. I lost a prospective client once, not because I botched the pitch, not because they said no, but I forgot all about them. The conversation got buried, and by the time it surfaced weeks later, the moment was gone. I had a dead lead. And that one stung because I knew exactly what a client like that was worth. Now, you didn't lose yours because you're not smart enough. You've done OChem, passed the MCATs, the boards, a residency that tried to break you. Intelligence is not the bottleneck. It never was. You lost them because you have no operating system.

So today, I want to fix all that. Not with another app, but a way of treating your own brain like a business, and using AI to run the parts that you keep dropping. My name is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. This is Bootstrap MD. This is the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs, and I help physicians build extra income outside of their clinical lives so they can live and have their career as their own terms. And here's the thing that nobody tells you as a physician entrepreneur. You don't have an idea problem. I've never once met to who said, "I just can't think of anything to build." That's not us. We see problems all day. We see broken workflows, frustrated patients, unrecognizable systems, gaps in the market, and we are pattern recognition machines and we've been trained for over a decade to notice what's wrong. So, ideas are not scarce for us. Ideas are the cheap part. What we have is a capture problem, a prioritization problem, an execution problem. The idea can show up at 2:00 a.m. or between patients or when you're driving or in the shower, and then it lives in your head or worse, it lives across nine different apps until it quietly dies.

So, think about how we'd handle this clinically. If a patient presents with you a real complaint, you wouldn't say, "I'll just try to remember that." You document it. You put it in the chart. You track it, trend it, act on it. The whole system of medicine exists because we learned the human brain is really a terrible place to store anything you actually care about. And then we walk out of the clinic and try to run an entire business out of working memory. So, I want to give you a line that hopefully it will sit with you. You don't lack intelligence. You lack an operating system. That's really the whole episode is all about today. Everything else is just plumbing.

So, I want to show you why this actually costs you. I want to get a little bit sharper because I don't want this to sound like a tidiness lecture. This is not about being organized for its own sake. I'm not here to help you out with ties anything. This is about money, specifically money that you're leaving on the table. So, when your ideas, your leads, and your assets are scattered across Apple Notes, Google Docs, unread emails, Post-it Notes, text threads, voice memos, and maybe a graveyard of ChatGPT chats, this is what actually happens is this. Follow-ups don't get made. The consult inquiry sits in a DM, and then it goes cold. Your leads will disappear. Somebody said, say, "Hey, let's talk at the conference." And then nothing ever happens. You meant to email them, but you didn't. Podcast topics evaporate. Content you could make three times over never get made. Offers stay half-built forever. That workshop outline, the course, the lead magnet. You might have 70-80% done, but it never gets launched. So, the priorities blur. So, you spend your limited non-clinical hours doing the loudest thing instead of the highest value thing. So, a forgotten idea is not harmless. But for a physician entrepreneur, a forgotten idea could lead to a missed revenue stream. Go back to that prospective client loss. Most of our our clients are paying us four figures or more a month. So, forgetting one person for a few weeks wasn't a scheduling slip. It was real money, real on-the-skin money that I just let walk out the door. And it wasn't because I couldn't close them. It's because the lead lived in my head instead of into a system. So, the good news is they can be fixable, and I hope to get this accomplished during this podcast episode.

So, let's define this thing. Because I'm sure you've heard the word second brain. It's been beaten half to death by productivity influencers, and I want to strip it back down. A second brain is not a fancy app. It's not Notion. It's not a color-coordinated dashboard that takes you four to six weeks to build and you never touch it again. If you built one of those, there's no judgment. I have too. They look really nice, but they're often useless. A second brain is a system that does four things. One, it captures what matters fast before you lose it. Two, it sorts what you captured into useful categories. Three, it helps you decide what actually deserves your attention. And four, it turns the survivors into output. Output includes content, offers, follow-up, revenue. So, that's it. Capture, sort, decide, and produce. And notice what the goal is not. The goal is not better notes. Nobody ever paid for a beautiful note. The goal is for you to execute better. So, if your system makes you feel organized, but you ship the same amount of stuff you shipped before, you don't have a second brain. You just have a very nice and pretty diary.

So, I want to go over what I'm calling the four buckets framework. Everything that lands in your second brain goes into one of four buckets. Just four. And the discipline is this, if a thing can't go into a bucket, it doesn't get to stay. It gets deleted. So, we'll come back to that. So, here are the four. Bucket one, these are your ideas. This is the raw material. Topics on podcast, content angles, business models you've been chewing on, a recurring patient question, a problem you keep seeing in your specialty that nobody solves well. Anything that's a what if I quote and quote goes here. That's bucket one, ideas. Bucket two is opportunities. These are people and openings and leads and potential partnerships, referrals, speaking invites, a guest you want on your show, someone you met with who you need to follow up with. The defining feature of an opportunity is that it has a clock on it. It goes cold if you ignore it. Bucket three is assets. This is everything that you've already built that has reusable value. These will be frameworks, templates, prompts that work, checklists, talks that you've given, old newsletters, case studies, maybe that episode from last year that nobody's heard in months. Most physicians are sitting in fortune on assets and treating them like they're disposable. And then finally bucket four, actions. This is the doing. This is the calls to book, the emails to send, an offer to test, a post to publish, a proposal to write. Actions are the only bucket that directly touches on revenue, which is why most people's action bucket is suspiciously empty while the other three overflow. And the rule that holds all these things together is if it doesn't land in a bucket, it disappears. That's not a threat, it's a feature. Most of what crosses your mind in a day should disappear. The buckets aren't there to save everything. They're there to save the things worth saving and letting the rest go, which is the part most of us, including myself, are really terrible at.

All right. I want to teach you how AI could fit in our bucket framework. And this is where most physicians get AI completely wrong. And I think it's most important because it leads to the whole unlocking of this puzzle. Most of you, I said before, are using AI as a search engine. It's a smarter Google. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer, and you say, "Cool." And you close the tab. That's really the least valuable thing AI does. The shift, and this is what matters, is from turning it in from a search engine to a delegation engine. I want you to stop asking AI questions. I want you to start assigning it tasks. Because your second brain has a problem. Capturing is easy, but sorting and deciding and producing is work. And you don't have the time. And that's the exact gap that AI can fill. So, instead of AI being the tool you write with, it becomes the assistant that operates the system. So, watch what you can actually do. It can take a messy stream of consciousness brain dump and summarize it into clean themes. It can read through your work of captured notes and extract the action items you buried. It can organize your ideas by revenue potential, literally ranking them for you. It can take a 5-minute video that maybe you did on your car or you're commuting and it turned it into a structured outline. It can draft the follow-up emails you keep not sending. It can take an old podcast episode, it might pull three newsletter topics out of it. It can scan your assets and tell you which framework you keep reinventing and should just template once more. It can build you a weekly action board from the chaos. So, I want you to think of it like this. ChatGPT can help you think, but the bigger money is in using AI to help you operate. Thinking is the part you're already good at. Operating is a part that's been quietly bleeding you, and that's why AI is so important. And one guardrail, and I would I've said this before, AI sorts and drafts, you decide and approve it. It's that intern, they're the resident, it's the one doing the legwork. It makes the first pass, but it's never going to actually send an email or make the offer without you signing off. You're still that attending physician, your name is on the chart.

All right. I promised you a system that you can stand up in about 20 minutes, and I don't want you finish this episode nodding and then doing nothing. I want Let's get started. Let's get some real work done. Step number one, pick one capture inbox. It can be Apple Notes, Notion, a Google Doc, Obsidian. I use a tool called Amazing Marvin, which functions on my laptop, my computer, on my iPhone. That's what I've used. All I'm It doesn't really matter to me what the tool is. It just needs to be consistent. Ideally, you want to have something on different platforms. Something that where you can capture what your information, whether you're on the go, whether you're at home, whether you're on vacation. Just pick one that you're actually going to open and move on. And then step two is you're going to create four labels or four headings. For anything. You want ideas, opportunities, assets, and actions. That's your structure. That's it. Ideas, opportunities, assets, and action. So, step three, I want you for a week dump everything into it. No organizing, no sorting. The voice memo, the screenshot, the half thought, the remember to email them, all of it goes in. All right, capture only. Resist the urge to tidy up at the beginning. Your only job this week is to stop losing things. Step four, I want you once a week. It might take you 15 minutes, 20, 30 minutes is what I usually spend on it. Whatever. You then hand the pile to AI and let it sort. So, here's a Here's a prompt that you can steal verbatim. Review the notes below and organize them into four categories: ideas, opportunities, assets, and actions. For each item, I want you to tell me why it matters, whether it could realistically generate revenue, the single next best action, and which items I should just delete or ignore. I want you to be ruthless about the delete list. Go ahead. So, take all that week of chaos that you got, put it in, and then run that prompt. What's going to happen? I think it can actually change your business. From everything that AI services, from then what it tells you what you need to do, let's have you pick three actions for the week, not 20, just three. The whole point of capturing everything you do is so you can completely ignore most of it and execute on the few things that matter. A system that hands you 20 priorities really hands you zero. I want you to capture wide, but act narrow, and that's the rhythm.

So, let me make this bucket concrete for you because I think the magic is really in the conversion. When something is in one bucket moves to another and starts paying you. A patient question you hear for the 10th time, that's not an annoyance. That can be a topic for a podcast. Maybe it's a lead magnet. A great podcast guest, that's an opportunity. That guest could become a referral partner or even a business partner of yours. A DM that says, "Hey, how do you do X?" That could be a consult call waiting to be booked. One of my own consulting clients started exactly that way. It was just a single app question, a DM in my Facebook. If that message had landed in the graveyard instead of in front of me, I would never have gotten in that client. A webinar outline you made for free once, that could lead to a paid workshop you've already done 80% of the work for. Most of your best business assets have already been created. You're just not capturing them.

So, I want to make just a just a some quick mistake that I often see. I hope you enjoy that prompt here, but I can predict how it can go wrong. There's a couple things that can derail you. First is tool hopping. You'll be tempted to switch apps the second this one feels imperfect. Don't. The tool isn't the problem. The over organizing. If you're building nested sub folders, you're already lost. We started with four buckets. That's it. Stop after that. Saving everything. I don't want to become a hoarder. A second brain is full of stuff you'll never use. It's just like a landfill with good lighting. All right? If you capture but never run the weekly sort, you're building an inbox not a system. Okay? The big one is confusing capture with execution. Just writing the idea down feels like progress. It's a start of something. It's just the on ramp, but it's not progress. It's all about creating action on there. A second brain never produces action. It's just really just being like a digital hoarder.

All right? So, let's bring this all home. Okay? We have talked about before medicine can pay the bills, but AI can build that balance sheet. And balance sheets doesn't grow from ideas. It grows from ideas that you capture, prioritize, and ship. The gap between the doctor who's thinking about building something and the doctor who's built it is really understanding that it's it's all about a system on here. And working with physicians on exactly this, it's not the one who's got the most AI tools, not the one with the prettiest setups. It's the one who builds a repeatable system and runs it every week, no matter how boring that sounds. Consistency beats sophistication each and every time on here. Now, if you'd like for us to help you with this, I invite you to come to our free school group. It's doctorsonlinesuccess at doctorsonlinesuccess.com. Currently, at the time of recording, I'm working with a handful of doctors who are serious about transforming their career and getting generally more productive with AI. If that sounds like you, go to doctorsonlinesuccess.com. You'll hear all about our new cohort that we just started. I want you to build a system around your business, not the other way around. Okay? So just remember at the end of the day, it's all about capturing inbox for four labels, one week, and a prompt. You've got this. I know you can do this. Remember guys, you're going to have your ups and downs as a physician entrepreneur. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.