PowerUp Coaching — Living Knowledge Base

2025-12-19_Mastermind

6 min read

2025-12-19 AI Mastermind

Table of Contents

Session Overview

The December 19 session was the final call before Lou’s departure from Taiwan — he joined dressed in local gear and expressed genuine warmth and gratitude for the community. With his iPad and no Mac Mini setup available, Lou handed the session to Don Back to lead a presentation: “From SEO to GEO,” a structured walkthrough of how to build LinkedIn authority for AI engine discovery. This proved to be one of the most polished and strategically valuable contributions of the year.

Don’s presentation articulated a three-layer authority architecture — Canon, Frameworks, Diagnostics — that provides the human-facing content counterpart to the technical schema infrastructure Lou had been building. The key insight: GEO doesn’t reward clever, isolated, viral posts. It rewards coherent thinking expressed repeatedly, through named frameworks, across a consistent body of work. One brilliant post doesn’t build authority; ten posts explaining the same idea from different angles does. Don also revealed a significant piece of news: LinkedIn has opened its content to LLM indexing, meaning LinkedIn articles are now GEO assets — not just human-facing content.

The second major contribution came from Kasimir, who described his business ontology — a 5-pillar structure he uses to filter every piece of content he creates and every question he poses to his virtual advisory board. This sparked a productive exchange with Don about the relationship between ontology/pillars (what you talk about) and Canon (what you believe to be true) — with Don encouraging Kasimir to articulate the beliefs sitting one level above his pillars, which he already implicitly holds but hasn’t yet made explicit.

The session ended on an optimistic note, with Lou and Don both noting the mastermind group is “6 to 18 months ahead of the curve” on GEO strategy — a rare position that combines the technical infrastructure layer (GEO app, schema, JSON-LD) with the content strategy layer (Canon, frameworks, LinkedIn as GEO platform), creating a compounding authority advantage for those who act now.

High-Signal Moments

  • Don Back’s core thesis: “AI doesn’t reward clever posts. It rewards coherent thinking expressed repeatedly.” — The fundamental inversion from SEO to GEO thinking
  • The LinkedIn-as-GEO-platform revelation: LinkedIn has opened its content to LLM indexing; your LinkedIn articles are now part of the AI engine knowledge base
  • Three-layer authority architecture: Canon (theory of why problems exist) → Frameworks (how beliefs become usable) → Diagnostics (where am I right now?) — a complete, buildable structure
  • “One brilliant post doesn’t build authority. Ten posts explaining the same idea from different angles does.” — Don on the compounding effect of content consistency
  • The recognition threshold: in marketing, it’s no longer 3–4 exposures — it might be 15, 20, or even 30 before someone recognizes you as a consistent voice
  • Kasimir’s 5-pillar ontology — a live example of a practitioner who has done the work of building intellectual infrastructure; described his advisory board using it as a classification system
  • Don’s addition to Kasimir’s ontology: go one level above the pillars to the Canon beliefs — “You already have them, you just haven’t made them explicit yet”
  • “The question is not, will AI change publishing? It already has. The question is, will your thinking be clear enough to be recognized?” — Don Back’s closing statement
  • Don’s campaign strategy: building GEO authority as the foundation of a launch sequence — so that when prospective clients research you in an LLM, it mirrors you back as the authority
  • Lou: “6 to 18 months ahead of the curve right now. So it’s a great time to strike and take advantage of this.”

Open Questions

  1. How do you construct Canon statements? What’s the test for whether a belief is truly Canon (always true) vs. just a framework or observation?
  2. At what point does your LinkedIn content library cross the threshold of being recognized by LLMs as an authoritative canon — is there a minimum article count or consistency metric?
  3. How do you integrate the technical GEO layer (schema/FAQ) with the content GEO layer (LinkedIn Canon-aligned articles) — what are the specific linking mechanisms?
  4. Short-form video embedded in LinkedIn articles seems to have strong GEO signal — what format and cadence works best, given that LinkedIn live is available but clunky?
  5. Dirk mentioned a ChatGPT advisory listing for service providers — is this a real, current channel for AI engine authority signaling, or was it already discontinued?

Suggested Follow-Through

  1. All mastermind members: Complete the Canon Map exercise — identify your 3–5 Canon beliefs, map them to existing frameworks, identify your diagnostic gaps. Share in Telegram before the first January session.
  2. Don Back: Share the slide deck from the presentation in Telegram so members can use it as a reference and adapt the framework to their own practices.
  3. Lou: Design a Canon Map prompt for the GEO app — so that Canon extraction becomes part of the onboarding process rather than a separate manual exercise.
  4. All: Audit existing LinkedIn content against the GEO pre-publish checklist (problem definition, why it exists, named framework, connection to prior content). Identify the gaps.
  5. Group: Plan the January mastermind around live Canon Map sharing — each member presents their 3–5 Canon statements and gets group feedback on clarity and distinctiveness.

Additional Resources

Links & Tools Shared in Chat

  • No external URLs shared in this session’s chat.

Books & Articles Mentioned

  • None.

Ideas from Chat

  • Noota.io AI meeting assistant (again): Kasimir’s noota.io bot auto-introduced itself at the start of this session as well — a GDPR-compliant automated note-taking service. Consistent presence across December sessions suggests Kasimir is using it routinely.
  • Vector Institute Toronto connection: Don Back mentioned a former colleague who is an exec at the Vector Institute in Toronto — Canada’s leading AI research institute. A potential resource/connection for members interested in enterprise-level or research-grade AI developments.
  • FAQs as website restructure priority: Don Back noted in chat that the FAQ work is “timely as I’m planning a website restructure early in 2026” — a real-world application of the GEO FAQ strategy directly triggered by this session.
  • AI’s acceleration anxiety: Donald Kihenja in chat — “I feel like at one point AI is going to decide to move on and leave us behind, as in, ‘These humans just can’t keep up.’” A recurring theme in the group worth addressing in future sessions as a psychological dimension of AI adoption for high performers.

Derived Artifacts

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