Built my expedition website myself after being quoted $2,000

Learning how to Swim again in a new way: My AI Mastery Story Before this Quest, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical. Not because I doubted AI was good or that it mattered, but because something in me kept resisting it. The unknown, maybe. Fear, probably. Or simply the feeling that I already had my hands full and did not need another complicated thing to learn. My relationship with AI had started in 2023 with ChatGPT, and I used it in the most basic way possible. Ask a question, get an answer. That was pretty much it. I never imagined how much further it could go, or how much it might eventually change the way I work and think. I found this program during one of the strangest transitional periods of my life. New York has been my permanent home since 2008, but earlier this year, after returning from a photographic mission in Alaska, I had to pack up my life and move back to Mexico temporarily while pursuing my green card process from outside the United States. So much of my photographic work happens abroad that keeping the freedom to travel was essential. So I packed for the unknown, not knowing exactly how long this chapter would last. And suddenly, after more than twenty six years away, I was back in Monterrey, my hometown, living beside my parents again. Can you believe it! They have a small house next to theirs that we call La Casita, and since coming back it has become my little nucleus, my studio, my refuge, my headquarters for this unexpected chapter of my life. One night, just before going to bed, I was scrolling through Instagram when an ad suddenly appeared for a free three day AI summit with Mindvalley. My immediate reaction was confusion. Vishen? AI? I could not make sense of it. I had known Vishen through the world of meditation, mindfulness and wellbeing. My Mindvalley journey started on July 6, 2016, to be precise, and I had followed his work and received Mindvalley newsletters for years without ever enrolling in one of their programs. So in my head I kept thinking, what does mindfulness have to do with artificial intelligence, what does wellbeing have to do with AI? My brain had not untangled that yet. Looking back now, it makes perfect sense. That Instagram ad landed on ground that had already been prepared, even if I did not know it at the time. I was excited, the way I always am when something new shows up. In my head I thought the summit would be an hour, maybe two, each day. Then I discovered it was six hours a day. My first reaction was basically, no way José. Six hours, for three days? I have work to do. I have projects. I have absolutely no extra time for something I am not even sure will serve any useful purpose. And then something happened. Because Vishen is Vishen, and because of the extraordinary people who shared their knowledge with us during those three days, I became hooked, more and more each day. My skepticism started making room for curiosity. Curiosity started becoming possibility. And suddenly I was imagining things I had not allowed myself to imagine before. By the time the invitation came to enroll in the full AI Mastery program, I knew I was in trouble. I was going through a very difficult financial period and simply did not have the money for it. But I knew, in my stomach, my mind and my soul, that I needed to do this. The universe had somehow brought me back to Mexico twenty six years after I had left, and there I was, living beside my parents again, knowing that the quickest way to make this happen was also one of the hardest things for me emotionally: asking my mother for help. My relationship with my mother has always been complicated, and after the financial crisis my family had gone through, asking her for money was not something I wanted to do. I probably would have preferred going to Mordor with Frodo than doing this task. But sometimes when you really want something, you have to put the fear aside, be honest and ask. So I went to her. I explained what I had experienced during those three days. I told her that something inside me was saying I needed this, that I believed it could become a catalyst for changing the way I was moving forward. She knew the struggles I had been going through too. I asked her to support me. More than that, I asked her to believe in me. And I promised her I would pay her back. To my enormous relief, she said yes. I told myself that if the program was not what I expected, I could always step back during those first few days. With an enormous amount of gratitude, I can say it went completely the opposite way. I never wanted to step back. Learning AI has felt, for me, like learning to swim again. I was a serious swimmer when I was young, so I remember what it feels like when you are first learning how all the pieces work together. Your arms are doing one thing. Your legs are doing another. Your core is trying to stabilize everything. Then someone tells you that you also have to breathe. At first nothing feels coordinated. Someone teaches you how to kick, how to position your body, when to turn your head, when to breathe. You repeat it again and again until one day you are no longer thinking about every individual movement. You have found a rhythm. And the best part is when you learn how to swim butterfly, the toughest stroke there is. For me, AI Mastery has been my butterfly. That is what these months have felt like. First you make space in your time to try something new. See if it works. Ask a question. Apply the answer. Ask another question. Make a mistake. Try again. Little by little, the coordination arrives. I will not pretend these months have been a smooth road personally. They have been their own particular kind of bumpy, and there were periods when I could not move through the material at the speed I would have liked. I did not always have the time to go back, review everything, practice every tool and immediately apply every lesson to my real life. But I kept showing up. Wednesdays and Fridays, and sometimes Mondays too, became days I genuinely looked forward to. The classes brought an energy and enthusiasm into my week that I had not expected. Hope, curiosity, good vibes, excitement. It felt like going back to school. Sometimes like being a teenager again. Sometimes like being six years old and learning something completely from scratch. Vykintas once said that the brain expands the more you feed it. I loved that idea, because I think something like that happened to all of us in that room, even those of us who never met one another in person. And somewhere during these months of the program, I started understanding that what was happening to me went much deeper than learning software. I enrolled out of curiosity. I wanted to understand what I did not understand. Surprisingly, I was not primarily drawn to AI because of image generation, even though I am a photographer and there is obviously an entire universe opening there. What pulled me in was something more personal. As a visual artist, I tend to procrastinate, because of a lack of financial means, or because I cannot always find the right people to help me pursue my projects. It is a quite lonely practice. I used to constantly wait, for the right moment, for the right person to help me, for enough money, for someone who knows more than I do to come along and solve something, for someone who believes in my crazy projects and can act as a patron and support my journey. I had a long list of things I had postponed for years: video making, music, learning to make images with AI, marketing, my finances, my systems, revamping my websites, organization, business structures. Somewhere inside me was this quiet belief that eventually a superhero would arrive who knew how to do those things better than I did and, boom, make things happen. During these months, something shifted. I started realizing, maybe I can solve these things myself. At this particular moment in time, I do not have everything figured out, not even close, but I am still learning to swim. And I know now that I can get into the water. One moment made me realize how quickly my thinking had already begun to change. It happened on May 14th, barely a month and a half after starting AI Mastery. Roberto Ortiz, a well known photographer friend of mine from Monterrey, was curating a photography exhibition and conversation at MARCO, the contemporary art museum here in Monterrey. I went with one of my best friends, Roger. We arrived a little late, found our seats, and almost immediately Roberto noticed me in the audience and waved from the stage. For some strange reason, one thought crossed my mind: oh my God, he is going to ask me to speak. Public speaking has always been one of my greatest fears, so I immediately pushed the thought away and concentrated on the conversation. They were talking about photography, photographic history, cameras, the physicality of the medium, and the enormous transformations photography has gone through. Then, toward the end, someone in the audience asked about AI. Roberto answered honestly that, from his perspective, he was skeptical. He explained that he comes from the traditional photography world, and why he did not feel particularly positive about it, and why he did not see himself ever using it. And then, suddenly, he turned to me. He said he had a dear photography friend sitting in the audience, someone who had been away from Monterrey for many years, and that perhaps she could share her perspective too. There it was. The ball had been thrown directly at me, and I wanted to run out of the museum. But somehow I found the courage not to chicken out. I remember saying it was almost funny that he was asking me this exact question now, because only a few weeks earlier I would have agreed with nearly everything he had just said. But not today. I had shifted from that mindset into a completely new one. I come from a generation of photography where I developed my own film and printed in the darkroom. I love the physicality of photography. Even in this digital era, that tactile relationship with an image remains incredibly important to me. So the idea that someone could simply write a prompt and suddenly create an image had initially felt almost absurd to me. No way, ever. But then I told the audience that I had given myself the opportunity to enroll in AI Mastery, and that learning about AI had completely changed the way I was thinking about it. I was not trying to convince anyone that AI was automatically good, or that every photographer should use it, or that my friend's concerns were wrong. What I had discovered was something much simpler. Never automatically say no to something you do not yet understand. Learn about it first. Try it. Understand what it can do. Then decide whether it belongs in your life or your practice. Because learning gives you options, and not many people have the luxury of options. We should be grateful for that. And when you suddenly have options you did not know existed, another universe begins unfolding in front of your eyes. I sat back down thinking, oh my God, he is going to kill me, I basically just said the opposite of what he said. But what stayed with me afterward was not that I had disagreed with him. It was that barely six weeks earlier, I could never have imagined myself standing in a museum telling a room full of photographers that they should at least give AI a chance. Something in me had already changed. And then the changes became practical. I feel a little like Speedy González now, not because I suddenly know everything, but because I move faster than ever. Emails that used to sit unanswered get answered. Ideas become proposals. Proposals become projects. Leads get followed up. Information that used to live scattered across different places begins to have structure. Things I would once stare at, thinking I do not even know where to begin, I now simply begin. AI has touched almost every level of my life, not only the professional one. Professionally, one of the things I am proudest of so far is beginning to bring the three parts of my photographic practice together into a thriving ecosystem instead of keeping them in separate rooms: my fine art work, my commercial work, and the altruistic work I have developed through many of my projects and collaborations. In 2024 I also began developing photography expeditions to extraordinary places, including Tanzania, Bhutan, Colombia and Botswana. This has become one of the most ambitious ventures of my thirty year photographic career. The creative vision was never the part I struggled with. I knew the places I wanted to explore. I knew the kind of experience I wanted to create. I knew the people and local partners I wanted to collaborate with. The difficulty was everything surrounding the vision: organizing information, creating materials, connecting all the moving pieces, explaining the trips, following leads, keeping everything updated. Before AI Mastery, I would put together information in InDesign or Keynote, create PDFs, send multiple documents for each expedition, revise them, update them again, and watch the information spread across different files and formats. Not long after coming back from Alaska, I asked a web designer I knew in Argentina what it would cost to build a proper website for the expeditions. He quoted me around two thousand dollars. I remember thinking, absolutely not, I could not justify spending that money at that moment. And then AI Mastery happened. I started learning. I started trying things. And somehow, step by step, I built the website myself. I still cannot quite believe it. For the first time, I have one place, https://robertamarroquinphotoexpeditions.com, that holds this entire expedition ecosystem together. What once existed across PDFs, presentations and scattered documents now has a home. And I built it. I am proud of that in a way that is difficult to explain, because it represents much more to me than a website. It represents something I had not fully trusted before: my own ability to figure things out. The money my mother helped me invest in AI Mastery became some of the best money I have ever spent on myself. And now my friends laugh because I have become AI Roby. I tell everybody about it. Even my nephew recently told me he was jealous of AI because I spend more time with it than with him. That made me laugh enormously. It also made me realize just how naturally this has become part of my life. If I had to reduce these months to three major takeaways, the first would be simple. I can do it myself. I no longer automatically assume that because I do not know how to do something today, someone else will eventually have to do it for me. The second takeaway is time. During that first three day summit, Vishen said that one of the greatest things AI could give us was time. I heard him, but I did not fully understand what he meant. Now I do. At the beginning of the summit I was worried about giving six hours of my day, for three days, to AI, because I already felt I had no time. Strangely enough, one of the greatest things I now believe AI can give back to me is exactly that. Time. Time to create, time to photograph, time to think and brainstorm, time to make art without constantly putting out fires around the business of being an artist. Because whatever this career is, it is complex. It is never a straight line. Realizing that I may finally be building systems that can give some of that time back to me brings me an enormous amount of hope. My third takeaway is something I could never have said with the same conviction before that evening at MARCO. Learning gives you options. You do not have to use every tool. You do not have to accept everything technology brings. You do not have to become someone you are not. But understand it before you reject it. Curiosity creates choices, and choices can completely change the road in front of you. What I want to build from here is already beginning to take shape. I do not want to learn every AI tool that exists. I want to become genuinely skilled with the smaller group of tools that truly serve the way I work, as an artist and a solo founder who leads her own projects while collaborating with galleries, curators, producers, travel partners, NGOs, designers, assistants and other specialists depending on what each project requires. I am already developing new ideas, including Quaesita, a print project connected to my exploration of AI imagery, and I want to rebuild my own fine art website alongside a stronger, collector facing print shop. But the bigger goal goes beyond websites or individual projects. I want to create a real operating system around my practice, a way to manage relationships, collectors, leads, proposals, projects and knowledge without everything depending entirely on what I can personally hold inside my head. My art will always be intuitive. The business surrounding it does not have to remain chaotic. And I do not want AI instead of the creative or human parts of what I do. Those are the parts I want to protect most. I want AI to help hold the structure, so the artist in me can breathe and keep creating with the same passion I felt the day I knew this was what I would do until I die. When I started this Quest, my arms and legs were going in different directions, and I was not even sure I wanted to get into the water. Four months later, I am certainly not pretending I have crossed the ocean. There is still so much I do not know, and I am still afraid of the unknown sometimes, even as I try to let go of controlling everything. There are tools I need to revisit, systems I still need to build, and an enormous amount I want to learn. But something much more important has changed. I am no longer afraid of the water. I know how to get in. I know how to move. I know how to breathe. And most importantly, I now trust that when I do not know exactly how to reach the other side, I can keep learning until I find my way there.