High Rise Influence

A year ago I was 17 and hearing the same thing from everyone around me: you need to get a job. You’re old enough now. Time to get out into the real world and get some experience.

I did well in school, so a job felt like the obvious next step. The problem was what that step actually looked like. My options were basically retail or fast food, standing at a counter handing people their orders. And I kept asking myself the same questions. Is this really worth my time? Is this actually building a skill? Is there any room to grow here?

There was another issue too. I’ve spent most of my life making social media content around professional dunking, which means I’m training constantly and traveling to events. I didn’t need a job I had to arrange my whole life around. I needed something that worked around my life.

Then in January I met Dennis Yu. He showed me things I could do for my own personal brand, and then he showed me what BlitzMetrics was building with their AI builder program. It blew my mind.

What I actually do

The work is simpler than it sounds. You take a client’s raw ingredients and turn them into digital assets.

Picture a plumber. He’s on a job site filming quick clips on his phone, explaining what he’s fixing and why. That’s the raw material. My job is to take that footage and repurpose it into content that lives on his social media and his website, run ads against it, and build out the pieces that support his SEO. The goal at the end of all of it is simple: make the phone ring.

You also document everything as you go. At the end of each week you send a report in the MAA format. Metrics, what you actually did. Analysis, how it went. Action, what you’re doing next. The action part matters most, and it’s the part most people skip.

Every Thursday at 2:00 PM Pacific we get on a Zoom call together, me, Jack, Dennis, and the other apprentices. We go through everyone’s real campaign data, figure out what’s winning and what’s losing, and work out the next move together.

Why being young is the advantage

Sam Altman said something in a podcast recently that stuck with me. OpenAI has been tracking how older people use AI versus how younger people use it, and the gap is enormous.

Older users mostly treat it like a Google replacement. Ten-word prompts. Where can I find bagels in my hometown.

Younger users treat it like a therapist, a life coach, a career coach, a tutor. They use it to break big abstract projects into small digestible tasks. Same tool, completely different relationship with it.

That gap is the whole opportunity. If you’re already on Instagram and Facebook, already filming things on your phone, already reasoning with ChatGPT or Gemini, you’re not starting from zero. You already know what good content looks like because you’ve been consuming it your entire life. Most clients are plumbers or contractors focused on their actual trade, and they have no interest in learning new AI tools. That’s where we come in.

The part that actually compounds

Here’s the framing that changed how I think about work. Most jobs extract value from you. You give up your hours and get a paycheck, and that’s the end of the transaction.

Get a job you can extract value from instead. Something that adds to your resume, sharpens your interpersonal and soft skills, and teaches you how business and marketing actually work. You never lose that. It shows up in your relationships, in your family, in whatever career you end up in, even if you go a completely different direction.

That’s the real contrast with college. You can do this alongside college, but college gives you one degree and the hope that it translates into one job. These skills translate into anything.

There are three things I’d point to. It’s a genuinely high-level position, you’re managing ad spend, socials, and a website for a real business, and that looks serious on a resume. It’s financially scalable, and these are the exact skills companies will be hiring for over the next several years. And you’re building your own personal brand at the same time as you’re building theirs.

AI is going to be like electricity. Everyone will use it the same way they flip on a light. If you’re an expert in electricity heading into the next few years, you’re valuable no matter what you decide to do.

Where to start

You don’t need to find a stranger to work with. Start with someone who already knows you, a parent’s business, a friend’s business. Deliver real results for one client before you try to scale anything bigger. Most of the apprentices we have actually get their parents to cover the program, which is a pretty good deal for you.

I’m still 18. I’m still training and traveling for dunking. And I’m doing client work that’s teaching me things I’ll use for the rest of my life, and getting paid while I do it.

That’s the option nobody told me about.