How to use AI better than 99% of people

Watch the video version of this letter on YouTube. Listen to the audio version of this letter on Spotify. Whenever I share how I use AI with someone else, it’s like it unlocks something in their brain. They feel like they discovered a new superpower. They feel like they can do almost anything. They can build the business faster. They can learn new skills faster. They can understand topics faster. They can effectively get ahead of 99% of people who use AI, because most people treat AI as a slot machine rather than something you can program to do exactly what you want it to. AI is a cool new way to ask questions and get answers, but most people stop there. It was supposed to be this life-changing thing, but if you were to ask the average person if their life has changed because of it, the answer will almost always be “no.” Now, I’ve only talked about this in public a handful of times, so I want to create a detailed and immediately actionable guide to change how you think about using AI. (When I say AI here, I mean LLMs. You can do this in any app like ChatGPT or Claude. You don’t need anything other than an AI chat.) First, I’ll show you my little secret. The first section alone, if you try it, will at least make you think “wow this is cool,” or it may blow your mind. Then, I’ll over some of my favorite examples and prompts for business, creative thinking, intellectual thinking, content creation, and maybe a few more. Specifically, how to create them, rather than me just giving them to you. Let’s begin. This is the most important part. If you simply practice what you are about to learn, you will be able to have AI do almost anything for you, and the responses will be up to par with the quality you demand. This is how you go from AI slop to imposing your sense of taste on AI. To do this well, you need to think of AI as a digital employee that will do exactly what you tell it to do. Meaning, if you don’t know how to do it well, or don’t know how to guide the AI to finding how to do it well, it will not do it well. In essence, you need to learn the skill of Prompt Engineering. That’s what we will learn. The reason AI isn’t that magical to you is because you type a one sentence request and expect it to magically make you a millionaire. The LLM has to guess what you actually want, pulls from an onslaught of mediocre ways to do it from the internet, and spits something out that may be slightly good, but not good enough if you want outsized results. In other words, you can’t rely on how the AI is programmed by default. You need to be extremely specific and detailed with what you are trying to accomplish. If I type “generate a viral YouTube script” into ChatGPT, sure, it will come up with something that’s okay, but think about it for a second: is there any one best way to write a YouTube script? No. Ali Abdaal has his own frameworks and methods. Alex Hormozi has entirely different ones. A gaming channel has even more different ones. All of the above have their own ideas, opinions, speaking style, presentation style, and more. The AI has none of that context. So, in order to get AI to do something well, in a high quality way, you need to teach the AI exactly how you would create the YouTube video. At that point, it’s not randomly generated slop, it’s an employee that’s acting on your instruction and learning as you refine the process by correcting mistakes. In other words, you’re going to be writing 500-2000 word prompts. Not once sentence. Not one paragraph. The shorter the prompt, the more guessing the AI has to do, and the more the output increases on the slop spectrum. In other other words, your job is to narrow the context to prevent the AI from guessing too much. But that still leaves a problem... what if you don’t know how to do the task well? What if you haven’t created hundreds of YouTube videos leading to you becoming an expert? Let’s start there. If I want AI to create a YouTube script, landing page, or if I want it to have a stimulating conversation with me, I need to instruct it on exactly what to do. You have four options here: 1) If you know what you want AI to do, write out the instructions. Most of the time, this will be quite long. Because if I wanted AI to be able to write my newsletter, I would have to pass off my thought process to it. I’d have to teach it how to generate good ideas, how to write a good hook, how to structure the newsletter, and how to structure each section. And, I’d have to do that for each style of newsletter I write, and instruct the AI on how to choose the write style. 2) If the task is relatively well known and doesn’t require creative thought, simply ask the AI to create a detailed guide. Here’s an example for creating a customer avatar, because people don’t tend to do that in their own unique way. Give me a detailed guide on how to create the most comprehensive customer avatar in the world. Simple, and it’ll give you a good result. You may think that this is pointless, because you can just find a customer avatar template online and fill it out, but AI can help you fill it out better, and help you do the market research that you probably aren’t going to do. 3) If you don’t know what you want to do, find an expert source of information, feed it to AI, and ask it to create a detailed guide. If you want to create an offer for your business, download Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers PDF or find a YouTube video breaking down how to create an offer. If you want to create a personal brand strategy, find an article or YouTube video that teaches one. You can paste the transcript into AI (you may need to use a tool that can extract the transcript) and have it turn it into a detailed guide like so: I want you to create a comprehensive guide on how to build a personal brand using the transcript below. Be as detailed as possible. Act like you are teaching me, step by step, in a way that makes it impossible to fail. [paste the transcript] 4) My Favorite: If you have an example you want to emulate, ask AI to break down why it works and turn it into a guide. I actually did this just yesterday. I saw a landing page that had incredible copywriting, and I wanted to understand it and replicate it using my own product’s information. So, I copy/pasted each line from the landing page into AI along with this prompt: I love this landing page copy. Break down the overall structure, what psychological tactics it uses, and why it works. Then, break down each line individually. Write this as if you are teaching me how to do it step by step. By this point, you should have a detailed set of instructions for the next step. If you are just reading this to learn and don’t have anything you are trying to do right now, hold tight for the next section, because the examples I give will show you how creative you can get with this. We have detailed instructions we can feed AI. But we’re still missing something... The personal context. If I have instructions on how to write a high converting landing page, how is the AI going to write it without understanding my company, product, features, and everything else that goes into the writing? This is where the magic happens. First, you are going to save this prompt somewhere very safe, because it will change the way you use AI as a whole. That prompt is a prompt that creates prompts. For the rest of this letter, we will call this the Prompt Creator so you know when to use this prompt. Yes, you read that correct. It has all of the prompting best practices so you don’t need to write the entire prompt and waste a ton of time. Now, you are going to create a new chat and send only that prompt. The one that creates prompts. It’s going to ask you what type of prompt you want to create. There are many ways to do this part, but here’s one that usually works well. You are going to ask it to structure the prompt in 2 phases. A context gathering phase and an execution phase. As an example for creating a landing page, here’s what…