"I Need Bacon Deodorant." And What That Has to Do With AI.

A few weeks ago, I was playing around with an AI model, and I typed something ridiculous.

I need a deodorant that smells like bacon as a business idea.

I hit go and watched what came back.

A full business plan. In minutes.

A brand name. A target market. A manufacturing source with minimum order quantities starting at 300 units. A pricing strategy with 55 to 65 percent gross margins. A go to market plan built around Father’s Day and holiday stocking stuffers. A viral social media strategy. Financial projections. A total startup cost estimate of under four thousand dollars.

One sentence. That’s all I typed.

I didn’t ask for any of that. I just said I need, told it what I was trying to do, and let it work.

That’s the whole lesson.

Most men over 50 are approaching AI backwards. They watch a YouTube video, try to learn the tool, get confused, and quit. Or they ask it a question like they’re Googling something and get a generic answer that tells them nothing useful.

Here’s what nobody tells you.

AI doesn’t work like a search engine. It works like a thinking partner. And like any good thinking partner, it works best when you tell it where you want to end up, not how to get there.

Start with I need. Then say the end result out loud.

I need three new clients this month in commercial real estate.

I need to understand why my department keeps losing budget in Q3.

I need to have a hard conversation with my business partner, and I don’t know how to start it.

Then add one more line at the end of every prompt before you hit go.

Ask me any questions you need before you respond.

That single sentence changes everything. It stops the AI from rushing to an answer before it actually understands what you need. It slows it down, makes it think, and nine times out of ten, the questions it asks back teach you something about your own idea you hadn’t considered yet.

Hit go. Don’t add constraints. Don’t tell it how to answer. Let it come back with what it sees.

Half the time it surfaces something you never would have thought of on your own. An angle you missed. A question you forgot to ask. A path you didn’t know existed.

That’s the moment that hooked me. When AI started teaching me things I didn’t know I didn’t know.

Here’s the other thing I’ve learned.

The best ideas don’t come from trends or YouTube videos promising ten thousand dollars in two weeks. They come from you. From the problems you’ve personally bumped into. The things that frustrated you. The inefficiencies you’ve watched happen for twenty years in your industry, and thought someone should fix that.

Write those down. Every one of them.

Then type I need and finish the sentence with the end result you actually want.

Don’t overthink the prompt. If you don’t even know how to start, type this:

I need a prompt to help me figure out if my idea has a market.

Let it teach you from there. The more you play with it, the more you ask, the more you interact, the faster you learn. There is no real barrier between you and the answer. Just a blinking cursor waiting for you to say what you need.

I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed after going deep on this.

The men who struggle with AI are waiting for permission. They want to feel ready before they start. They want to take the course, learn the tool, and get certified in something.

The men who are winning are just typing.

They’re messy about it. They’re wrong sometimes. But they’re in the conversation, and every conversation teaches them something the course never would have.

You’ve spent thirty years solving real problems for real people. You know things a twenty-five-year-old with fast fingers doesn’t know and can’t learn yet. AI doesn’t replace that. It takes everything you already know and gives it a megaphone.

But only if you start.

So tonight, before you go to bed, open any AI tool. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever you have. Type two words and finish the sentence.

I need…

Say the end result. Hit go. See what comes back.

Bacon deodorant optional.

The clock is real, brother. Let’s get to work.

Sean