How to Make 2026 The Best Year of Your Life (With AI)

In 2025, I made over $8 million online. I got in the best shape of my life. I traveled the world for nearly 4 months. And I nearly doubled my following online. And I was able to do all of this as a 25-year-old with no degree and no rich dad while living in a tiny country that most people can't even point out on a map. So, how did I do this? I actually first shared this method at the end of 2024. And that video went viral. And since then, hundreds of thousands of other people have applied this method to start using AI to build their dream lives. And so with 2026 just around the corner, I wanted to make this video to give you guys all my updated strategy on this method because it's so simple and effective that I think everyone should be using it next year. I'll start by explaining the core concept that this method is based on which explains why it's so effective really and then we'll dive into each skill one by one and I'll share the simple ways that you can start using them today to make 2026 your best year yet. So let's get into it. Now, if you are new here and don't know who I am, my name is Liam Mley and just three years ago, I got into AI with zero experience. And now my agency, Morningside AI, does AI strategy and development for some of the world's top sports teams and Fortune 500 companies. And I also run the world's biggest AI business community with over 270,000 members. And so, through my free content here on YouTube and inside my community, I help people to learn AI like I have and build businesses so that they can also create their dream life. All right. So, the first step to making 2026 your

best year yet with AI is understanding why most people won't have their best year yet in 2026. Because if you don't understand the problem, you can't actually fix it. So, here's what usually happens. Most people's plan for 2026 is going to be simple. It's just to try harder. Work more hours, go to the gym more, post more content, and for 99% of them, they're going to be burnt out by March. And they'll end up in the exact same place at the end of the year wondering what's wrong with them. But in the AI era, this strategy is completely outdated. See, most people believe that the only way to get more is to do more. Like more effort equals more results. But that's a lie. And the most successful people in the world don't necessarily work harder than you. They just have something that you don't, which is leverage. It's when you put in

a small amount of effort, but you get a massive result out of it. For example, when Taylor Swift writes a song, she just does that creative work once, but that song can be streamed a billion times, making her millions in the process while she's asleep. Even that's a relatively small effort with a massive result. Another example would be when a CEO sends one email with a new strategy. 500 employees across 10 different countries start executing on that within hours. So that one small action of sending an email has 500x the output. Or probably the most famous example is when someone like Warren Buffett decides to invest in a company. He does pretty much the same amount of thinking whether he's investing a million dollars or a billion dollars. It's the same amount of effort, but one decision makes him $100,000 and the other one can make him 100 million. So that's leverage. It's small input, big output. But here's the problem. Most people have zero leverage in their life. You're going to work an hour and you get paid for an hour. You send one email, you help one person, you do a task, and you get one result. It's like a straight trade of time for output. And that's why no matter how hard you work, it never feels like enough. So for most of history, leverage was only available to a select few people. You needed tons of money to invest like Warren Buffett, or you needed a team or company to manage like a CEO, or you needed to be able to create content or code that could scale to millions of people without you having to do the work every time. And for the most part, regular people just had to grind to get where they wanted to go live. But AI has completely changed that

because AI is a totally new form of leverage. and it's possibly the most powerful one that's ever existed. It gives you labor on demand, like having an assistant that works 24/7 for you. It gives you the ability to create content like images or videos or music instantly without needing to know how to do the skill yourself. And it gives you the ability to code and build tools and apps without needing to be a developer. And the most ridiculous thing that literally changes the game for all of us is that you can get all of these powers for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription. And this is what most people don't realize right now. And it is why the 2026 is going to be tough. It's because the massive winners over the past few years, like myself, the people who are getting ahead faster than ever, aren't necessarily working harder than you. We've just figured out how to use AI to build leverage for themselves. We're applying it across everything we do. And for every unit of effort that I put into something, I'm probably getting 10 to 100x more output than you are. So, you literally cannot beat that no matter how disciplined you are or how much more effort you put in next year. And a great way to understand this was pointed out by the billionaire investor Mark Andre and he was asked recently what kind of person will win in the AI age and he said I would probably bet more on people who are able to be broad. You can use AI to go deep whenever you need to but your job as a human is to basically cross domains. Hear that again. Your job is to cross domains. So he's saying the winners in AI age won't be specialists who go deeper and deeper into one narrow thing. They'll be people who can combine skills from multiple areas. people who can like think like a designer, they can build like a developer, and they can communicate like a marketer all at the same time. And that person like no matter what your career or what you're trying to do with your life, that person will literally win in any area they go into. So it doesn't matter if you want to climb the corporate ladder and stick in your job or start a business or just have more control over your life. Having those skills of knowing how to get results with AI across multiple different areas, it is literally a superpower and has changed my life and thousands of people who watch my video back at the end of 2024. And here is the crazy part again, something that no one is really awake to right now is that with AI, you can become that person in

weeks, not decades. And this is what I call being an AI generalist. first shared in that video at the end of 2024. And being an AI generalist is built on a simple idea that you don't need to be the best in the world at any one thing. You just need to be pretty good, like 60 or 70% of the way there at a few key skills. The cartoonist Scott Adams calls this skill stacking. And he says, "If you want average success, be the best at one thing. But if you want extraordinary success, be good at two or more things. " In the old world, getting good at multiple things took you 20 years. You have to get a degree and then go into the field and practice it. But with AI, you can get 60 to 70% of a professional skill level in just a few weeks practice. You can learn to build basic apps and websites without being a developer. You can create professional designs without having to go to art school. You can automate workflows without understanding code. And when you staple these skills together, you become incredibly valuable in the AI age. So, let me give you an example of this in action, which is with myself. So, I know how to build software using AI. I've built custom tools myself, for my team, for my company. I was literally doing it this morning. And I know how to design with AI, too. So, I can create beautiful websites and graphics and apps myself. And I also know how to produce content with AI. I can generate and edit video for anything I need. And finally, I know how to write and communicate with AI. I've used AI writing tools to help me reach millions and millions of people on this channel. And that combination of skills has completely changed my life. But the thing is that I'm not actually that special. Like I said, I first started talking about this AI generalist thing at the end of 2024. And that video went viral. And since then, tens of thousands of people have applied that same mental modeling method that I talked about. Many have built their own businesses. Some have become the AI leader in their company and got promoted. and some dropped out of university entirely to just go and pursue their own thing. And this stuff really works because when you're at 60 to 70% on any of these skills, you're valuable. But when you have them all together, you literally become unstoppable no matter what you are doing, what career path you're going

down. And the way you become an AI generalist is by mastering what I call the four powers of an AI generalist. Now, the reason this is so powerful is because it's not talking about specific tools because the tools change pretty much every month. But these are basically categories of capabilities. And once you understand each category, you can adapt to any new tool that comes out. So let me walk you through each of these four powers. And for each one, I'm going to show you exactly how I use it in my own life. And then I'll give you the exact steps to gain that power yourself. And by the end of this, you know exactly what to focus on to become more capable and ultimately a lot more dangerous than 99% of people in 2026.

The first power is the power to automate. And this is the ability to take any repetitive task in your life and get AI to do it for you. You're literally creating more time in a day to make progress on what actually matters in your life. And this is such an essential first step. And the truth is that most people waste 5 to 10 hours every single week doing the same boring tasks over and over again, like scheduling meetings and summarizing emails and prepping for calls and organizing data. And I used to do all that crap, too, but not anymore, thankfully. And of course, there are levels and levels to this power of AI automation, but here's a simple way that I use it in my own life to save a few hours a week that any beginner can apply to their own life and save hours every week also. So, for this channel, I do about two to three podcasts every week. And before every episode, I used to spend 2 to three hours researching the guests. I'd read their bio, watching their interviews, coming up with questions asked them. And now, I built a custom Claude skill that does it all for me in 60 seconds. And this is an awesome new feature in Claude that allows you to basically create a reusable prompt or workflow that has a sequence of steps for the AI to follow. And when combined with stuff like MTP servers, which basically allow Claude to do things in my favorite apps like Notion or elsewhere, these Claude skills become incredibly powerful. So, with my podcast prep skill, I just type in the guest name and say researchers guest and hit enter. And then in just a few minutes, Claude will go and pull their entire background from the web. It's going to summarize the best interviews that it finds. It's going to generate a list of unique questions about that guest. Then, it's going to drop it all into a notion doc, perfectly formatted for me to check out whenever I want. Now, one automation is going to save me over 100 hours this year. And I built dozens of these things just to get rid of those little annoying tasks that I found myself doing over and over again. So, here's how you gain this power. Step one is to go into Claude, set up your model context protocol or MCP so that Claude can connect to your favorite tools like your calendar, your notion, your Gmail, or whatever other apps you use. Step two is to think of one task that you do every week that follows pretty much the same pattern. It could be summarizing your meeting notes. It could be drafting your follow-up emails. It could be organizing your research or just anything repetitive that you find yourself doing. Step three is to build a Claude skill for this. And like I said, a skill is basically a saved prompt that walks Claude step by step through the process to give some kind of output that you want. These are super simple to set up and I'll put a link in the full guide that's going to come with this video on how you can acquire all these powers. Like all the step by steps I'll do for each of these powers is going to be on a free resource to my school community. So you can get that from the first link in description and it's in the resources section in the classroom. This is by far the easiest power to start with and it's going to immediately buy back your most valuable resource which is time. So let's get on to the next power. The second power is

the power to build. This is the ability to create your own custom tools and software without having to write a single line of code yourself. As you probably know, for most of recent history, if you wanted to create your own custom app or software, you had two options. You either spend thousands hiring a developer, or you spend years learning to code yourself. And thanks to AI, this is no longer the case. Because for the cost of a Netflix subscription, anyone can use tools like Lovable, Bolt, or Google's incredible AI studio to be able to build your own tools and software. You simply need to be able to explain to the AI what you want and then it will build it for you in minutes. So if you're a student, you can use it to create a flashc card app that tracks your progress and kind of gamifies your learning. Or if you're an employee, you can turn that boring spreadsheet you've been staring at for 2 years into a beautiful dashboard. You can build in some buttons that automate repetitive tasks related to that spreadsheet that you have to do. And if you're an entrepreneur like me, you can build incredible custom software to use internally in your company to make it run smoother and faster. And I know this stuff can sound pretty overwhelming at first, but it's actually really, really easy to get into. So, for example, here's how I used this power to build just a few days ago myself. Every week, I have a coaching call with my business coach. And because we do the calls over WhatsApp, I actually record the audio on my voice memos on my phone. And before each call, I'm supposed to fill out a prep sheet, which is like reflecting on what I talked about last time with him, what I said I was going to do, and what progress I've made since our last call, and more importantly, what I want to focus on in the next call. So this process of figuring out what I said last time and what I've done since then was taking 30 to 40 minutes. Honestly, I'd often skip it because it just felt like such a chore. I'd leave it to last minute. And so the other day I decided to build a tool to do it for me. And so I went to Google AI Studio and I described what I wanted and in about 20 minutes I literally had a working app. And so now I just upload the MP3 file from my coaching call and the app transcribes the conversation. It allows me to chat across all of my previous coaching calls like an all- knowing performance coach. And because it can see all of my past coaching calls, it can actually help me to identify patterns across dozens and dozens of past calls. And finally, it can help me to autofill the prep sheet for me, saving me 30 to 40 minutes a week. So, this one tool has made me way better at tracking my personal progress and saves me hours each month. And this is just one example for my personal life. So, in my business, I've built all sorts of different apps to help me write YouTube scripts faster, tools for my team to generate thumbnails, and a dozen other things as well. So, this is by far one of the most valuable skills to learn in order to become more valuable and build leverage and really crush 2026. So, here's the simple steps for you to gain this power. Step one is to think of one annoying thing in your life. It could be anything. Maybe you want to track your meals more easily. build a habit tracker that actually works for you. Maybe you're a student and you want a tool to store all your notes so you can chat with them. Once you have this thing, go to chatbt and describe what you want. Say like, I want to build an app that does X. Can you turn this into a full software development brief? That's really essential. brief. If you need more info, then ask me. And so this will get you in a conversation going back and forth with chatbt until it has all the details about the functionality that you want. And step three is to take that brief and paste it into Google AI studio or bolt lovable, whatever you want to use, and watch it build the app for you in literally minutes. And then all you have to do is just chat back and forth with it to refine what it does until it gets to exactly what you were looking for. Now, I'll be real with you. To get the most out of these five coding tools, you do need to understand some basic vocabulary about software because the words you say determine how well you're able to get to the end result that you're looking for. But good news is I'm such a nice guy that I put together a full vibe coding course for beginners inside my free school community. Takes about a day to get through it all, but it'll teach you literally everything you need to know about software and the right words to use in order to start building quickly. After that, it's just practice. It's literally just a habit. So, anytime you have an annoying task or process, you can ask yourself, can I build an app for that? Like that question and the ability to answer yes to it over and over again is what's going to make 2026 your best year yet. Now to get into the next power. The

third power is the power to create. And this is the ability to generate professional quality images, video, and music instantly. And here's why this matters. A picture tells a thousand words, right? And so a video tells way more than that. And so that alone is leverage, right? With that video, you're able to say in 10 seconds what would have taken 10 minutes to explain with words. And right now, AI creative tools are going absolutely insane. They're getting so good. Here's the kind of stuff you can do. Say you wanted to launch an e-commerce store yourself. Lots of people have thought of that at some point. You can now generate professional product photos in any style and any setting, any lighting without a fancy photographer. Or say you're going to build a personal brand, make content. You can start to create Instagram posts or ads or content that looks completely legit without a design. Or say you need a video ad for a business you're starting. You can generate a cinematic and high-quality ad in minutes that literally looks good enough to be like a Super Bowl ad without having to hire a videographer or an editor. And you can even generate custom music for your YouTube videos or your projects without being a composer or even knowing anything about music. So, being able to generate images and video and audio opens up so many doors for you. So, here's what you need to know about creating in each of these different categories. And no, this is not a sponsored video. All of these are just my genuine recommendations of what I think you guys should be using as a beginner. So for music I recommend something like suno which can generate original tracks and music in any genre in seconds. For images the best models right now are seedream and nano banana pro. Both of these can create insane photorealistic images just from simple text prompts. For videos the cuttingedge models right now are Google's V3 and OpenAI Sora 2. These things can generate full video clips from text or images that you give it. Now the thing is that these models change all the time. By the time you watch this, there's probably some new ones out. So, what you want to do as a beginner is just to find one platform that keeps everything in one place and keeps it nice and simple for you. And for my creative team and a lot of the stuff you're seeing in this video, we do it on Invido. And this is because it gives you access to the best image and video generation models, makes it easy to stitch clips together, and just basically simplifies the whole process of creating incredible video and image content. So, here's some simple steps to gain this power to create. Step one is to pick some random product in your house. Literally grab it and take a photo of it. Now, we're using something like Nvidia. go and generate a bunch of really sexy looking image ads for it, like different poses and different backgrounds or lighting, and then try to make some video ads with that same product that make it look super cinematic. Make it look like a Super Bowl commercial. Give it a story line. And I promise you, you're going to be blown away by what these tools can do. And once you know how powerful this stuff is, your brain will start connecting the dots as you're just existing in the world. So when that business idea comes along or the need to pitch something at work comes along or you just want to create something cool and express yourself, you'll know that you have this power. and all the other ones in your back pocket. And that is the key to leverage crushing 2026. Now, the fourth and

to crushing 2026. Now, the fourth and final power is probably my favorite and that is the power to connect. And this is the ability to write clearly and persuasively and use that skill to build an audience, influence people, or just communicate better in your job. And if I'm honest, this one is kind of optional. Not everyone wants to build a personal brand or become a content creator or a marketer, and that's totally fine. But here's the thing. Being able to write well and clearly is a superpower because it allows you to persuade and to influence and to clearly communicate your ideas in a way that moves people. And that is insanely powerful. Whether you are using it to write better emails at work or to create content on LinkedIn or X or to write killer marketing copy for your ads or build a YouTube channel like this one, it's incredibly powerful to know how to do that. And for me, this has been by far one of the most life-changing skills that I've ever worked on. And I've been able to do it largely with the help of AI. And here's how. So, by far the most game-changing tool for me has been what's known now as AI whiteboarding tools. And so, you can think of it like this. So, you take a model like Claude, which is really, really good at writing, and you give it all the context that it needs about you, like who you are, in my case, what my business does, your tone of voice, the kind of people that you're trying to talk to, the messages communicate, and then whenever you need to write something, the AI can generate content that sounds like you, understands you, and what you're trying to do instantly. And I use this stuff heavily for literally all of my content, just to speed things up. The tool I originally used for this was Poppy AI, but for you guys watching, it's quite expensive. It's only on a yearly plan. So, if you can't afford that, I'd recommend something like BL AI instead. Terrible name. Again, not affiliated with it, but it's basically an AI whiteboard where you can add these layers and layers of context and information or documents about your brand or YouTube videos you like, posts that you've written before that performed well, and then just basically like connect it all up into a chatbot. You can think of this as like a custom version of Claude or CHBT. And from there, you can take other people's ideas and combine them with your own style and write really, really fast. So, say you found an awesome YouTube video like this and you really love the ideas inside it. Well, you could take the link to this video, put it into your whiteboarding software, and then use it to draft LinkedIn posts to write YouTube scripts of your own to create ad copy or whatever you need by giving Claude the transcript of that video, then also all of the information about who you are and what you're trying to do. Then, when you chat away to it, it's able to write content in your tone of voice much faster. So, here's how you gain this power. Step one is to sign up for a tool like BL AI. Secondly, you need to give it some context about who you are and what you're writing about. And then from there, you can start experimenting. You can add in a YouTube video that you liked and ask it to generate 10 different angles that you could write about to serve your business needs or whatever you're trying to do with your job. And from there, you can build out each of those ideas into a draft and then start posting them. Or hell, if you want to be like me and really want to apply the power to build that you've gained, you can literally just try vibe coding your own version of this tool. I've built my own personalized version of these kind of whiteboarding apps and use it for myself that's perfectly adapted to my workflow. And so this is what all of you can do and this is what I'm really trying to push you all to start thinking a little bit different next year about hey maybe I can just make my own version of app that's perfectly suited to what I want. And look, this power is really for people who want to start a business or build a personal brand or just become a better communicator and marketer. But if you do master it, it is one of the most valuable skills you can have to make 2026 a freaking incredible year because it definitely changed my life over the past few years. All righty. So, those are the four powers. Automate to buy

back your time. Build to create your own tools. Create to bring your ideas to life. And connect to share what you're doing. When you stack them all together, you become an AI generalist. Incredibly valuable no matter what you're doing with yourself in 2026. And remember that most people's plan for 2026 is just to try harder. It's more hours, more grind. But I've told you in this video that is not the play anymore. The play is to get smarter. It's to build leverage like the most successful people in the world. To figure out ways to get more from less. And that is what AI can do for you in 2026. It multiplies you in many different ways. So here's what to do next. You need to pick one of these powers. Build one automation, make one app, create one video, just freaking start. And to help you do that and take action, I've got a full step-by-step guide and the courses that I've made around these powers that's available in my free school community which is in the first link in the description. If you request to join and then wait 2 minutes to get lit in, you'll be able to go to the classroom section, go to resources, then see the full guide on how to take everything I've just talked about in this video and apply it just like the hundreds of thousands of people who took action on this stuff last time I made a video like this and their lives have been changed in the past year. Of course, if you've made it this far and you enjoyed the video, please leave a like. It helps me to reach more people with this stuff. And of course, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already for more videos on how to learn AI and use it to build your dream life. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur and you're looking for how to start an AI business in 2026, I've got a full breakdown on the latest model that I'm recommending to everyone heading into 2026 up here. But that is all for the video, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Good luck in 2026, and I'll see you in the next one.