Welcome to Gibson Growth Academy

Last year, my daughter started kindergarten.

Such an exciting time. She was getting ready to enter the world of big kids.

To me, kindergarten is the year you set the precedents. This is what our family expects.

And here's one of ours: we don't sit around waiting for someday. We set goals and we go make them happen. Someday isn't a day. TODAY is. So what's the baby step we can take right now to get one step closer?

So the week before school, we had Vision Board Night.

I gave her categories. Health. Life skills. Community. For each one, she had to set a goal and come up with a plan to actually reach it.

It's really an exercise in owning your own story. At five years old.

Now, I've always been a "goals" person, and honestly, I usually reach them.

But this year something wild happened.

Because I saw my board every single day, I hit most of my goals in under three months. All of them within the year. So I started adjusting it every three months or so. New goals, look at it daily, and boom. Hit them again.

And every time, my confidence skyrocketed. Because if I could do that, what other limiting belief was I just believing for no reason? Ya know?

So this year, first grade starts, Vision Board Night rolls around again, and I'd just finished my honest postmortem on Mom Ops (that was last week, catch up here).

I knew what my next mountain was. Content strategy. I'm bad at it, and it's the thing standing in my way.

But here's the trap. We live in a world where every piece of information you could ever want is right at your fingertips. And somehow that makes it HARDER. You get so overwhelmed by the pile that you do nothing at all.

I almost signed up for some guided class. Not because I needed it. Just to make the decision fatigue go away.

And then it hit me.

What if I build my own guided class? A real one. An actual syllabus, with actual deliverables. (Ahem. Kind of like the thing you're reading right now. Hehe.)

THIS. This is what AI is actually for. Not doing the work for you. Helping you build the thing that makes YOU do the work.

So yeah. I'm now enrolled in my own Gibson Growth Academy.

(Yes, I named it. Obviously I named it.)

Here's how to enroll yourself.

How to build your own academy

1. Name your mountain. This isn't about fixing some weakness. It's the thing you're curious about. The thing that would take you to the next level. The Scout badge you always wanted to earn. It can literally be ANYTHING. Mine right now is content. Say it out loud.

2. Turn it into a syllabus, not a vibe. This is the AI part. Ask it to act like a curriculum designer and build you a real course, from where you are now to genuinely good. Modules, in order, one thing to practice each week. Then push back until it fits YOU and not some imaginary student.

3. Make the homework something you ship. Not notes. Not "learn about content." Actual delivered things. My final project is this newsletter, published every week, good or not.

4. Put it where you'll see it every day. This is the whole vision board secret. The goals I looked at daily are the ones I hit. A course sitting in a folder you never open does nothing.

5. Adjust every few months. Hit the goals, move the board, pick the next mountain. That's the whole loop.

That's it. That's the Academy.

Or skip the setup

Real talk, because that's the whole point of this newsletter: you can do every bit of this yourself. Get the paid version of Claude, build yourself a little skill, and tinker until it spits out a syllabus. That's genuinely the DIY path, and if you go do it, I will cheer you on. Loudly.

But if you don't want to fuss with any of that, I already built the tool.

You tell it the one thing you want to get good at, how much time you actually have, and how you like to learn. It builds you a real class: weekly modules, one thing to practice each week, a short list of resources worth your time (not the whole overwhelming pile), and a final project you'll actually ship.

It's the same AI. It just runs on my account instead of yours. That's the whole reason it costs anything: $2.95 so you can skip the setup and go straight to the syllabus.

Build my own class →

Next week I'll show you the other thing I promised: how I finally figured out what I'm actually good at. I even built a little tool so you can find yours too.

Want it in your inbox? Sign up below. And if you enroll yourself in your own academy this week, hit reply and tell me what you're teaching yourself. I read every single one.