This video investigates whether Artificial Intelligence, specifically Google’s Notebook LM, can serve as an effective personal or work coach by leveraging a vast amount of personal data.
Central Theme: Can AI provide meaningful coaching by analyzing extensive personal context (notes, writings, reviews), and how does it compare to human coaching?
Key Points & Process:
- The presenter loaded approximately 40 documents (nearly 150,000 words) into Notebook LM Plus. These sources included private notes (coaching session notes, life goals, personality assessments, gratitude lists), public writings (articles, summaries, life stories), and multi-year annual reviews.
- He then posed a series of coaching-style questions to the AI, probing areas like strengths, weaknesses, recurring challenges, contradictions between intentions and actions, blind spots, past moments of happiness, and potential future regrets.
- The AI demonstrated a strong ability to synthesize this large dataset, providing accurate summaries of strengths (e.g., visionary, creative) and weaknesses (e.g., self-criticism, idealism, difficulty delegating).
- It effectively identified core tensions and contradictions noted in the source material, such as the conflict between desiring work-life balance and prioritizing work achievements, or wanting financial prudence versus being a free spender.
- The AI surfaced potential blind spots (like underestimating his team or avoiding the emotion of disappointment) and reminded him of past experiences linked to happiness (meditation, deep work, specific retreats), suggesting revisiting these activities.
- A novel insight emerged when the AI, prompted to suggest an unasked question, recommended exploring the connection between physical sensations (somatic experiences) and psychological states/goals, proposing a practice called ‘active body awareness’.
Conclusions & Takeaways:
- AI excels at processing and recalling vast amounts of context far beyond human capacity, making it excellent for quickly building a knowledge base, identifying patterns, and summarizing personal history. It can instantly connect details across numerous sources.
- However, AI currently lacks the emotional intelligence, intuition, and ability to interpret non-verbal cues (body language, tone shifts) that are hallmarks of valuable human coaching.
- The presenter concludes that AI is not a replacement for a skilled human coach but serves as an outstanding complement. AI can handle the information-heavy lifting and context synthesis, potentially enhancing human coaching sessions (notes from which were a key source for the AI).
- The recommendation is to leverage AI tools for self-reflection by feeding them personal data and asking targeted questions, using the generated insights alongside, not instead of, human connection and coaching.
Source: I Replaced My $700/Hour Coach with NotebookLM – Here’s What Happened
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