Transcription
I firmly believe that AI can potentially double to triple every single one of my companies per year. That's how big I think it is. What would take someone two weeks to put together everything you need to really do a thorough job now takes, you know, under an hour. This right here was probably the replacement of at least three months of work. You get more done, better and faster. The quality of your work improves drastically. There will be a democratization of execution.
You are wasting 80% of AI's potential because you're starting every single conversation from scratch. Meanwhile, your competitors are getting strategic insights from AI while you're stuck explaining your business context over and over and over again.
Today, I'm building a master prompt live. And you'll see exactly why this completely changes the game. Follow along with me. Welcome back to the channel, Hayden. Thanks for having me again, Thiago.
So, last time we introduced you to what the master prompt is, what it's for, and what are some use cases. As we saw in the comments, you wanted guidance in how to actually create one for yourself. So, that's what we're going to do now. We're going to open up the template that we shared with you previously, which we'll share again in this video, and just walk through answering and completing this template step by step with the help of both an AI itself—in this case, ChatGPT for those of you who would like to use ChatGPT instead of Claude—but also with the help of Hayden here as my kind of personal master prompt coach.
For people who are just joining us for the first time, say a little bit about your background in business.
Sure. I've been an entrepreneur all my life. I dropped out of high school at 17 and started my first company. I've bootstrapped probably seven- or eight-figure companies. Last decade I've spent buying businesses, and I've bought over 30 businesses that collectively make 10 figures a year in revenue. I'm currently on a path to buying or investing in about 20 businesses a year.
How does AI figure into your business endeavors?
I mean, AI is just this massive transformational project that applies to every single business. So it's where I spend most of my time, and I'm now sort of developing a pod of people, and we kind of work with AI and figure out how to innovate it across all the businesses.
And how do you connect all that experience to the master prompt? What does the master prompt do that makes you interested in teaching it?
It is the second brain for an organization. And so I'm very interested in developing it out to actually end up containing like all the processes from within our business and be able to automate many things, be able to do automated reporting, really try to remove all of the annoying repetitive tasks that we have to do in business.
You're getting into some quite advanced applications, but we're just getting people started on just the V1 of their master prompt, right? Which is, you know, for me it was like a super—it was an aha moment. And even this V1, I—I would say is enough to make people probably at least twice as productive, especially in like a leadership role or in a strategy role.
If you want to see how this applies to your specific business, we're running a program where Hayden and I work directly with business owners to build their master prompt. And then not just that, but to use that master prompt to radically improve every single major function within their organization. If you're interested in joining the next version of Second Brain Enterprise, I encourage you to sign up to our waitlist. The first cohort, which we're actually teaching right now, completely sold out. So, don't wait to do that. And if you watch till the end, we're actually going to package together all of this—the prompt, my insights, Hayden's coaching—all together into a free custom GPT that we'll share with you that will guide you through the process of creating this for yourself.
Ready? Let's get into it.
So here's the prompt I'm going to be using, which—don't worry, we will provide to you—and it basically tells ChatGPT to act as a business coach, the foremost authority on organizational design and strategic planning, and it's giving it a task, which is to help me understand and document my professional context. Then we have more specific instructions, which are to create a canvas—that is the ChatGPT term for a standalone document—which it will call the master prompt, and then to ask me a series of penetrating questions, one at a time—that's important—to answer the questions which are in our template and then fill it out based on my answers.
I'm going to put my cursor at the beginning, hold down the shift button, go all the way to the end, and click again to select this whole thing. Then I'll hit command C on the keyboard. Head over to ChatGPT. I like to use the ChatGPT desktop app. And then I'm going to paste it in a new chat and hit return.
So this starts out with some pretty basic questions. I'm pretty sure I can answer these on my own, but let's see. So there's my name. It wants to know my role or title. I'm going to say founder and CEO of Forte Labs. I already said this, but I'll say Forte Labs. This is the first question that I have some doubts about. So it's quite an open-ended question. It's like, how do you want to use AI? My first instinct is like, for practically everything. How would you make this—this question—kind of manageable to answer? I would think about probably two things. So I think about, what am I weak at? What do I not enjoy doing? What do I want to automate? Because AI can almost be looked at as another form of delegation. Secondly, I would look at where does AI provide the most leverage for my business.
Okay, that is very helpful. So for the first one, I'm going to say, to help me think through the strategic implications of my decisions. I know in the past I've sometimes made major business decisions like pretty compulsively, like just in the moment. So I want to be a bit more strategic. And then for the second one, where can I leverage AI? I'm going to say, and to help me document processes in my business, because I don't really like doing that and I think it's something that it does well. So I'll just say those two.
Question five: What would you consider your core professional strengths? Skills, traits, or capabilities that set you apart? My initial thought is: thoughtfulness, thoroughness, love of learning, detail orientation, curiosity, work ethic, people skills. Is there any other way that you would think—in—in terms of strengths?
Yeah, I always—there's a great question. It's like—I think a flywheel question by Jim Collins, which is like, where have you had success professionally where other people have failed? So, I—I like that because I mean, this—this list could potentially be very long. I could say like, I'm kind of—exactly—but you want to focus in on almost like where I'm strong that others tend to not be strong. So in that case, I'm going to say, wow, that's a very good question. Just knowing you as a friend, I would say curiosity, love of learning, thoughtfulness. The other ones are—are kind of more common in a way. There's a lot of detail-oriented, thorough people out there.
Yeah. Almost another thing is like, if you—if you randomly put, you know, 100 people in a room, would you be in the top five on those things? So you're looking for skills where you are an outlier.
Yeah, you're uniquely good at, and I would say like top 5% or—or better. In that case, I wouldn't put people skills. So, I'll just narrow it down to those four. There we go.
What are your weaknesses? Is this just the reverse of the previous one? Like, where are you unusually bad?
Yeah. So, where have you failed or struggled where other people might have succeeded? And—and here I wouldn't say—so last one we said sort of top 5%. Here I wouldn't say bottom 5%, but I might say like definitely bottom 30%. And obviously this is in a professional setting; like I'm probably bottom 5% in sense of direction, but that doesn't affect me in my career.
Okay. So business skills where you're in the bottom third, the bottom 30 or so percent. Okay. There's a streak of lack of practicality, interest in esoteric things. Yes, it is a weakness in building—in building a business at times. It's more of a—a boredom or a lack of interest in the non-esoteric. Oh, tendency to boredom is a big one. I'll often ignore major problems in the business or major opportunities because I'm just like bored of them. I'd say also—this is maybe related to that one—resistance to doing anything I'm not interested in, which sometimes has been a weakness.
Love these easy questions. This one I definitely know the answer: April 2014. So, five full-time and a few part-time contractors doing things like design and web maintenance.
Who do you report to? No one. Who reports to you is really primarily Julia, our GM.
This one, I have a question. I don't know if it's because we're an information product business or because we're an online business. I don't typically think about markets, at least not geographic markets. Would you define this by like a—like a demographic or psychographic or something?
I go into all of it. You do sort of a geographic market primarily, which is the languages that your products are offered in.
Huh. I guess so. English-speaking countries. Mainly English-speaking. And then outside of that, you'd probably want to go into the demographic.
Yeah. I think I'd say mid-career professionals and entrepreneurs in—I'd say developed countries or urban locations or large cities, although we don't live in one. And then I'd add at this point interests.
Okay, that one I can definitely say: interests in productivity, self-improvement, learning, science, AI, and note-taking.
Do you think that's specific enough?
Yep. We'll get more specific in a minute. We're just kind of looking for like a first pass here. There we go.
Who is your ideal customer? If you've been in business for a while, I would go levels deep. So I would ask, with my previous customers, if you don't already know who your ideal customer is, because we have a very large market there. With my previous customers, who has had outsized success? If I look at this from a demographic perspective, so for example, in one of my companies, Acquire, we help people buy businesses; veterans do like four times better than anyone else.
Interesting. And it's something to do with their ability to persist in a difficult process and their willingness to adapt. So what is the equivalent here? And outside of looking into like who's had particular success, I'd also see who like experiences the problem most deeply, who has the active, urgent problem—um—of self-improvement and note-taking that they're motivated to move right now. And then finally, you don't want to go too small such that the size of the market is not large enough for you to sustain yourself. Look at what that size of the market is to understand who tends to be most successful and have the biggest outcomes from what I do.
The second one was, who experiences the problem most deeply? Oh yeah, who experiences the problem most deeply? And then I already forgot the third as well. Uh, size of market needs to be large enough.
I have a question about that. What do you say to people who—and I've had this feeling in the past—who fear defining the customer so narrowly that you miss out on opportunities?
You can expand that ideal client over time. I would say that this is the key to differentiation. Differentiation is the key to high margins. And high margins are the key to profitability in a company. For example, if you are a construction company that constructs anything versus you're a construction company that specializes in data centers, the company that specializes in data centers can charge more because they specialize in data centers. But they can also have lower costs because they do the same thing over and over again. Their processes are optimized for data centers. And so their margin might be—in a construction company—might be like 40, 50%. Their gross margin versus if they went and did a hospital that they don't do or, you know, a random warehouse; their margins might be half of that. It's about zooming in and kind of specializing.
What comes to mind is a certain kind of person who is kind of already highly intelligent, professionally successful, and self-aware, but lacks—there's like an infrastructure layer that they're missing. Lacks frameworks, mental models, systems, and tools that enable them to use their knowledge and expertise effectively. Is that a good ideal customer definition?
I think it could be honed. This would be difficult for you to quantify the size of the market. I would add one more thing, which is, who has money, right? This is a business; ideally, you want to sell products at good prices that they can afford. And so that kind of goes with the—the problem, right? The person who experiences the problem most deeply is more—most willing to spend money. So I'll take a look at those—that description, right? Highly intelligent, professionally successful, self-aware. I see—are they business owners? Are—do they hold a certain position in a company? Are they managers? Are they leaders? All of those examples are people that have money to spend and also people that probably see a little bit more urgency or return on investing in, you know, self-improvement. But you could also go into other spaces where it's not—not even financially motivated. Maybe it's more purpose-oriented. Maybe it's more like, it will save lives if they get better. That's also an active urgency.
So right now I would say Forte Labs as a whole doesn't really specialize on a specific customer. I would say it's around your brand, which is highly thoughtful and esoteric, and so you are naturally attracting other thoughtful, esoteric people. However, you could imagine a version of Forte Labs that was designed for doctors or was designed for CEOs or COOs, right? And you could imagine that that version of Forte Labs could probably charge 20x.
Yeah, I have seen evidence of that. There's certain people that feel like, you know, they say things like, this would have been a bargain at a hundred times the price, and other people, you know, for the same product at the same price that can't afford it. So there's like this big variability around whatever product we're offering.
So based on what you said, I have noticed there's people who have stakes of some kind who are therefore motivated to—to learn about, you know, these new systems and frameworks are a big part of my—my customer base. I'd say leaders, managers, professional creators, entrepreneurs, executives. So, I think I'll add that. So, it's almost like I'm compiling a to-do list of things to look into and research and think about just from answering these questions.
Yeah. And all of this is part of strategic planning in a business, which is not a one-time thing, right? It's very, very iterative, and, you know, it should be kicked off and reviewed quarterly in a business at a minimum.
Question 13: What is the main outcome or transformation that you deliver to your customers? Would you do this on like an—an emotional level or like things that are measurable and tangible?
Uh, both. Yeah, it depends on the business. So the—the emotions come to—to mind first: things like a sense of relief, hopefulness, self-confidence, ambition, as well as significantly more organized productivity—tasks, notes, projects, goals, and a set of technological tools that they understand deeply and know how to use.
How do you—how do you rate my response?
I think it's good. I would call it—Yeah. Sense of relief from overwhelm, and the transformation is from hopelessness to—to hopefulness.
How is your offering different from your competitors? I'll first write my gut instinct. Both my content and my courses and books tend to be deeper, more substantive, more nuanced, better researched. I don't say so myself, um, more grounded in history, science, and psychology, more practical and actionable. So typically when you think of like an offer and you think about differentiators in an offer, the first thing you look at is the likelihood of success higher than your competitors. Are you competing under that differentiation, right? If you come with me, you are the most likely to succeed in $100 million offers. Alex Ramos uses this great example of: you want to lose weight; there's lots of ways you can lose weight. Probably the most probable way to lose weight would be you get a liposuction, right? It's like you're 100% going to lose weight. Yeah. Um, but it's bad in other ways, but because of that, you pay much more for a liposuction than you do for, you know, a personal trainer. So, first one is higher outcome of success. Second is get success faster than your competitors. Third would be that it's easier for you. You have to put in less effort. A fourth would be that it's less risky or safer. In your case, that probably doesn't apply. So firstly I would say compete on one of those. Later on you can compete on multiple, but ideally you compete on one. In your case, you are probably competing on—what—you know—I would say better, right? So more thorough, and only on that because it's actually like worse on the others. It's slower, takes more work. It's not really faster. It's just more effective, but it's not—it's definitely not easier.
No. But I'm sure you see the infomarketing style of this, right? Uh, which is get-rich-quick style or get-productive-quick style offers, and—and they are successful. So I think that's the framework to approach it by—the—the last one is cheaper, and I would suggest not competing on cheaper—um—just because again that affects your margins, which means you don't have much of a business future. You can only compete on cheaper if you have, you know, other major advantages. So, I think what this is going to make me add is to just highlight my offerings tend to be more effective than others, but also require some time and investment of effort to get results. This isn't a straightforward—like—this is how I'm better. It's sort of how I'm different, I guess. So, right now it's important to contrast. So right now you're talking about what your offering is, not what your offering could be. Right? So I think it's important just to say this is reality today. You can then—once you have reality documented—you can then have aspirations documented, and you can start to think about that. You can also add it here. As I go through this process, I'm realizing that I need to think about this and perhaps focus on the differentiator being speed as an example.
Yeah, it'd be nice if I could maintain effectiveness and then start increasing the others. I'll leave that as a first pass for now.
Who are your competitors and what do they offer that's similar or different? What comes to mind here is: it depends on the product. Like my books have very different competitors than say our membership. Should I like pick our most important product for this?
Yeah, in this case, I mean, you can mention it in the master prompt about that differentiation. I would—I would say take your highest revenue product or service.
Okay. And then I think I'll even say that for the Second Brain membership, it's kind of our main source of revenue and flagship product. Our competitors are other courses, memberships, communities, accelerators, coaching programs, etc. that offer exclusive content, training, events, networking, etc., such as—I'll think of like Ali Abdaal's Productivity Lab, Writer Carol's membership. It's funny 'cause I'm like friends with all these people—also Nick Milo's accelerator program and Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Nest Labs community.
What's interesting here again is that because your ICP isn't that targeted, it's fairly difficult to answer. Um, actually a lot of these other people also don't have super targeted ICPs. It would be interesting if you explored looking at like a very segmented ICP for leadership teams and then understanding who exists in that sector. There's basically a whole another pass. I could look at each one of these questions through the lens of like going a level deeper.
Yeah. What I would say is, yeah, you're looking at this through the lens of a pretty broad ICP, and these are your competitors on a pretty broad ICP, which is low-ticket, potentially low-urgency, broad range.
Yes. And not a ton of differentiation.
Yes. Right. In the offer. But if you looked at some of these others, you would definitely find these other companies; they may not be in the form of a book or a course. They may be in the form of workshops, um, speaking engagements, right? More high-ticket. So, we're seeing the downstream effects of that broad ideal customer profile.
Who's currently on your team? So, I'll just say Julia, general manager. We have a pretty small team, so I can answer this pretty succinctly. Rebecca, ops manager. Nikolai, YouTube editor and strategist. And Alysia, YouTube project manager and strategist. I'm not going to add salaries. That's confidential, but is there anything else that you would put here for a small team like this one? Maybe if there are important contractors involved. A thumbnail designer is a surprisingly important contractor. Patrick
Web master. I think I want to differentiate here, like for contractors. I don't want it to assume that these people are, you know, around all the time. Uh, Maya designer. Okay. Okay, for each core team member, so I'll focus on the full-time staff. What is their most important performance metric or success target? What is a performance metric or success target? Performance metric, KPI, success metric. It's it's a very generic term, and it has a lot of different interpretations. Let's say to ask like what is a good KPI or what is a good success metric would be, in this example again, what is a leading indicator that is controllable by Nikolai that is directly tied to the outcome of the highest level process? So, leading indicator—which could you say what you mean by leading? It would be something that Nikolai can control. So, for example, this is hard on a YouTube video cuz I don't know YouTube. It's more like an activity metric. So it would probably be something around like the actual number of videos that he outlines would be a leading indicator. Target versus actual. The number of ideas that he identifies, plans, sort of strategizes around. Yeah. Cuz that then would tie to the number of videos that get published, that they would then tie to the number of views that you get. So that's leading because it happens early in the process, right? And it's controllable by him. So say what you mean by controllable. Poor metric would be something that he can't control. It could be something like the number of videos published. If he's not part of that process, he can't control that. So he could make 50 great outlines, but the person on the production side doesn't publish them, and now he's punished for that. So when you say controllable, does it have to be completely controllable just by him?
Fully within his control. Ideally fully within his control, but also as closely tied to the outcome of the process above him as possible. What do you mean by process above him? So when we said his process is plan a YouTube video, but the process above was organic YouTube marketing, right? And so you know the outcome of organic YouTube marketing might be marketing qualified leads, but he needs to understand when you design the process, you need to understand what is the outcome that's directly tied to it—leading, controllable, and directly tied to the outcome. Yeah. I wonder if I could come up with these for Julia. Oh, one other thing is that it should not be a vanity metric. What do you mean by a vanity metric? A vanity metric. I mean, it's kind of similar to directly tied to the outcome, but a vanity metric would be like number of subscribers, number of views. Those are like mostly what YouTubers count because it's vanity, right? It's just—does that actually tie to revenue? You may have a video that has 700,000 views, and you're all chuffed about it, but most of those views weren't for your ideal client, which is usually the case.
It went viral. Exactly. It didn't do anything for the business. There's four criteria for Julia. Since she's the general manager of the whole business, my first instinct is to put profit. Can the profitability of the whole company be a KPI? 100%. For a GM, it's P&L control. That's usually what it is. Obviously, it's tied to per strategic planning outcome is the financial performance. It's profit is not a leading indicator. In fact, it is the ultimate lagging indicator. Interesting. Right. There's a concept called the balanced scorecard, and basically it takes everything to say that there kind of four areas of leading to lagging from bottom to top, and they flow up. Actually, at the bottom you have people, and you have training, and then you have processes on the second level. On the third level you have execution, and then finally you have finance, and so everything always flows up. So that's leading all the way to lagging. So it should start with people. It could if you wanted to make it leading. So you might give her ultimately two. One could be the most important outcome, which is NOI—NOI, net operating income. Okay. Um, profit, or it might be ultimately on the execution side or even on the process side. It depends what your focus is. What comes to mind for this when I think about what is way upstream of profit? I kind of think for us it's launches. Almost all our revenue, even for the subscription product which is is a recurring revenue product, how people come into it is when we do at least a small launch—at least just like this is a new feature that we launched or here's a new exclusive event. Would number of launches per month or per quarter be a good one?
That would be a great leading indicator. Yeah. How many KPIs should each person have? Everyone needs to have at least one number, and I would say if everyone has more than like three numbers, that's probably too much dilution. So I would say one to three. I personally like to do two cuz I find that one tends to get you the lagging indicator only. You could say if you did two, you could have one lagging, one leading. I like that. So number of product launches—leading. For the lagging one, would you just say is it better to have a like a an absolute number for profit or a percentage? So usually it's it's goal versus actual for all of these things. So you're the CEO of the company, right? And so it's your job to actually go out and create goals for the company and communicate those goals. Uh, Julie, as your GM needs to execute on those goals. And so if you say the goal is I want to make a million dollars in profit this year, ultimately is she hitting the goal, right? She she agrees to the goal; is she hitting the goal? If you're if you say I want to do eight launches this year, how does she do, or I want to do two launches this quarter? So almost always your your KPIs are goals versus target; it's not that just the higher the better. No, no, because it needs to be realistic, right? It needs to be constrained to your actual resources and abilities—target versus actual. I don't think I'm gonna add that for every one though, just for the sake of simplicity. I think I'll just say profitability. Net operating. What'd you say? Net operating income. Yeah. And for each of these, I'll keep in mind or I'll make a note that it's target versus actual.
For Rebecca, I'm going to put something like this one's harder because she has quite a range of operational and administrative tasks that I don't have much visibility into. I guess I could say like what do you call it when they have a customer support email and they're like good with it? Customer satisfaction. Yeah. NPS. But that's a lagging, right? Not really. Like if you actually think about lagging would be a churned customer. The absolute lead, if you're looking at like customer satisfaction, the absolute leading would be something around how quickly do they deal with tickets and how well rated are those. Somewhere in the middle might be the actual ratings or an NPS, a net promoter score. But typically for operations, this is about quality. NPS is usually used as part of customer success. But now I'm getting into aspirational things that we don't actually do. So I should stick to what we currently do. If you don't actually report on KPIs, then you kind of have to be aspirational. Okay, that's true. Okay, we're being aspirational.
For Nikolai and Allesia, they live together. They're partners, so they work as such an integral team. I almost want to give them the same KPIs. I guess I don't know enough about how they divide their responsibilities. That's fair. Number of video concepts or like prepared video concepts. That was an example for a guide around preparing video concepts, but actually they're responsible for a higher level process, which is the entire YouTube marketing. So that would probably be the—So I'll tell you what most people think. They would say number of views and number of subscribers—both of which I don't think is true. I think it's actually what are the number of qualified leads because again we're going market-to-lead. If you publish a YouTube video, your metric shouldn't be how many views do I get? Your metric should be how many emails do I get? And are those emails from my customer, my ICP? Because if you get a bunch of emails, then they're from people in a different country outside of your ICP with a totally different demographic, they're not that useful. But doesn't all that fall under qualification? Yep. That's why it's qualified for leading. I think I'll say number of videos published, right? Oh boy. Okay.
Okay, I'd say the flagship is the second brain membership and I'll just say recurring subscription for $650 a year. BASB foundation and pillars of productivity courses, which are $4.99 and $250 respectively. A number of books averaging $15 and Second Brain Enterprise, which is currently or at least was $10,000. What new products or services are you planning to offer in the future? Not really any besides those. No plans. So, I like its guidance here. I think I'll describe them collectively as information products that offer instruction, training, and education around use of technology, either in the form of a book, course, membership, or cohort. It's basically saying that wasn't good enough. Please be more specific. Good job, Chat GPT. Yeah, it's not letting me be lazy. Dang it. Is a members-only—see how how simple I can get away with that—that offers networking and ongoing training in PKM. The courses offer curricula in frameworks for personal productivity, and our books contain the core info related to PKM, productivity, and related topics. So one one comment there is those are all features, not benefits, right? And so you could say that second brain membership offers community and community accountability as a benefit. Meet peers, meet other people interested in it. Problem it solves could be loneliness. The problem it solves could be a lack of access to peers in your local friend group. And the courses probably offer accountability and structure that the books don't. Right? So again, those are benefits versus the features. So would you try to include both features and benefits? That's what it asked for. Did it? Oh, dang. I missed that. Okay, Chat GPT, you're letting me get away get away with too much. Luckily, we have Hayden here as well. I'll save that for a second pass later on.
What the heck are core values, and how do I know what they are? If you've ever worked in a company or owned a company that had good core values, it is a game changer. And if you've worked in a company that had bad core values, meaning they weren't real, they weren't true, it was probably worse that they had those values than if they hadn't had them at all. A good value is a fact. It's not an aspiration. It's real. And they don't need to be good traits. They need to be real. Your values attract who works at your company and who succeeds in your company. Who gets promoted? Who gets hired? Who gets fired is based on values and basically showing anti-values. Ultimately, it's what gives a company. So, it gives a couple different things. It's a decision-making framework for you. It gives you speed, but it also gives you culture. It gives you something unique to follow. One of the interesting ways to look at values in a small business is you actually look at the strengths and the weaknesses that you listed because often the values and the DNA of the founder spill over into the organization. I can say like right now based on some of the strengths and weaknesses you showed—thoughtful, thorough—you had those both for for strength, like personal like learning, voracious learner, and then some of the things you said were weaknesses—esoteric, not financially focused, easy to boredom. How do those express themselves as values in the company and culture? I'm not sure because—so I'll give you an example. I have a set of personal principles that I think I'm pretty aware of, but I'm not completely sure if they translate directly to organizational values. For example, um, I have a personal principle to just always follow where my curiosity leads. I don't know if I want everyone in the organization to do that. You know what I mean? Do I need to like translate it to an organizational context?
I would say your brand does it. If you're curious about something, you follow that curiosity. Your brand publishes it. Right now, you are conflating who you are, Thiago, with what the brand is. So, if you thought about like removing yourself from the company, but the company continuing to run itself, would you make that a trait in the brand? In which case, it probably would become a value. It's like follow your curiosity as a value. That's what you talk about. That's what you do. The expression of voracious learning and curiosity in an organization could be around having 20% time, right? That like Google used to have—giving people the time to follow their curiosity and build things. Another way, especially for slightly larger companies or companies who've been around a long time, which you have, is what people have succeeded in your company and what traits—what common traits do they have—and also the anti-values is what people have not succeeded. They were just horrible hires. Life was so much better after you fired them, and what traits—common traits did they have? That brings to mind uh very high autonomy. You basically have to be almost completely autonomous in this in this team because no one's going to tell you what to do next. So what autonomy—I think I think that is—yeah, autonomy for the curiosity thing you mentioned—how I would separate myself from the brand. So I'm trying to imagine like if I were to sell the company imagine and just and step away and exit. But then I almost think, well, then in that case I would just want them to stick to exactly what I said. I wouldn't want them to go follow their curiosity to all these different things, still using my name probably. I would fear that loss of control. So, it's almost like that my value would flip from open-ended curiosity to quality control and consistency. I kind of look at it from a customer-centric perspective. Why do people follow Forte Labs? It's a great question. I don't know. Anyway, I think I I would I do I would agree that autonomy is definitely one of your your values. Like people who've succeeded are autonomous. People who haven't are likely not. You could be more specific. You could say initiative, self-directed. You could phrase it as a sentence. I would recommend two things—like phrasing it as a sentence, also actually turning it into an acronym, which by the way Chat GPT is great at.
Yeah. For someone being introduced to this for the first time, would you have them try to identify like three just as a first initial pass at this? Yep. I think that's that's a good start. Usually there's like a leading—almost always there's a leading value in the company, and that's often like the people value. For us, we have our core values spell SERVE, and I guess for people who know me like the first value is systematic excellence. I see everything in systems. Personally, we have two values. The the V in SERVE is voracious learning. Those would be like the two I'd say leading values in our company, but we do try to obviously look at all five. Is there like an assessment or quiz that you recommend for people to walk through for this—the core values specifically? Not that I know of, probably. I'm sure there is. Ask Chat GPT. So, the three that come to mind are autonomy, authenticity, and then to balance authenticity's effectiveness. I feel like what reigns in, you know, it's like follow your heart and your curiosity, but like we're here to serve. We're here to be useful to people. We're here to do things that actually make sense. I would agree with that with everyone I've dealt with on your team. I'd say they've all shown that. I think there's something innately like giving about you and your brand. I think you want to try to give everything away for free. Yeah. Sort of using you as a sounding board here. Generosity. Good enough for a first pass.
What is your organization's mission? Oh boy. My first instinct is just to make people more productive so that they're more fulfilled so that they're happier in their lives, but that feels broad to me. Maybe I think it's fine to be broad. I say with their work and lives. Your formula here, your Mad Libs version of this, right, would be like we make target ideal customer. Maybe there's a better way of looking at this is we solve X problem for target customer in order for target outcome. Uh, this goes back to my ICP problem, like people who are already really high functioning but they they're so smart it's messing up their lives. I I hate to say make high-functioning people even more effective, but there is something to that. We're not really serving people that are at a a low level of functioning either in their career or in life. So how about we help high-functioning people? So what did you phrase this before? It was um relief. Yeah. Right. Relieve their stress, relieve their overwhelm—overwhelm their sense of overwhelm so they can live—then if you really want to get into it you could say by—what is it that you do—delivering educational experiences—this is turning a little bit more into a value proposition than a mission though—you might want to get rid of the the by—you're going into value prop—I would just say so benefit which you have—so they can live more productive, fulfilled, and happy lives. Yeah, this is I think this is our mission more or less. Okay, you should put that on your website; that is what we spend all day every day doing.
What's the biggest, most audacious, ious long-term goal for Forte Labs? My first—let me tell you my first instinct is just to—it's like change the mainstream understanding or the mainstream practice of our topics—personal productivity, note-taking, PKM, AI—change it in which way? Make it more realistic, more research-backed, more practical, more with a higher ROI. It's like so many different dimensions. Do I need to pick one? What is the ultimate transformational outcome of the world if that happened? What isn't the transformational outcome? Well, what's the one that you you're seeing, right, that excites you? It's the most fundamental feelings that dictate people's day-to-day experience—their self-confidence, their agency, their optimism and hope, their level of ambition. All those things are raised with your better education. Okay? So, phrase that in an absolutely audacious way in terms of like it makes you uncomfortable to say it out loud. Jim Collins calls this a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal. Peter Diamandis calls it a massive transformational purpose, an MTP. Some examples, Google's is to organize the world's data. That was at the time a laughably audacious goal back in '99 or whatever. And now it's like, oh yeah, they did that. I feel like it's this because it's like it's like there's a meta level in our company. We are an education company, but also the topics we are teaching themselves are educa. Like productivity—you have to be productive and organized to learn. You also need to take good notes. You need to leverage AI. You need to have self-awareness. So, it's like there's this feedback loop. How could you phrase that in a way that was more measurable? Gosh, you know, it's funny. The the first one that comes to mind is is that everyone would make way more money. Cuz I kind of feel like that's like one of the real bottlenecks, life satisfaction and fulfillment. Because like you you need the funding. It's one reason we focus on people's careers cuz then you improve in your career, you increase your income, and then you have funding for all the other pursuits. So here here's something I'm thinking, and obviously this is me, so it's not you, but the book Multipliers talks about actively measuring how productive and engaged employees are in companies and basically saying, hey, what on average people are like under 50% productive? Literally, if you could get people to 90% productive, imagine the effect on the company. If you could get the world to 90% effective from 40% effective, imagine the impact on society. Yeah. What if you were to double the effectiveness of the world? And productivity can be measured through personal transformation. I Dude, that's that's an awesome one. We double the level of global productivity, which is on a downward trend by the way over decades, through personal. Yeah. It's not about oh by adopting so-and-so technology. It's all all about the person. There was a really interesting quote that organizational change comes from the cumulative effect of personal transformation. Yeah. Why does productivity matter? Cuz then you have the time, the resources, the money, everything to do even more personal transformation. I really think as AI unleashes our bandwidth, that would be the best use of our time, every form of personal transformation. There's like a feedback loop between these two elements—global productivity, personal transformation. That was very well put by you. Okay, got to share that with the team. That was all.
Questions that it's now put into what's called a canvas, which is just basically a document. So, now that we have the master prompt, I'm going to go ahead and download this as a PDF by clicking right here. I'll call it Thiago's master prompt. And then I always like to put the date, which is 6525.
Then we're going to head over to the web browser version of CashPt because that has a few extra features that we're going to need. And I'm going to click new project over here on the left and say Thiago's master prompt. I'm going to click add files right here. Add files again. Look in my downloads for the PDF. Exit out of here. And now we have the file there, as you can see.
So let's do a little test just to see if this is all working. I'm going to say, "Give me five ideas for new products or services that my ideal customer profile would like. It knows all about my business, that we're about productivity, that we're about education, that we're about people-to-people connection, knows about second brain, knows that we're into coaching." Doing a just a quick scan of these five ideas, I can tell you immediately they're all relevant. They're all in the ballpark.
And just to be sure that's actually true, let's open up an incognito window. Go to chatgpt.com. So this is a completely blank canvas. It knows nothing about me. No memories, no master prompt. And ask the very same thing: "Give me five ideas for new products or services." So there you go. It doesn't even--it's not even willing to give it a try unless it knows a little bit more about me. And I guess I could sit here for basically the same amount of time giving it all this context, but so much more useful to have all that up front, right?
So, I actually want to do an even better example. Heading back to the five ideas that it gave me with full knowledge of my master prompt, let's actually pick one of these. I really like this idea, a PKM certification program. This is actually something we've considered several times in the past. Instead of just being like, "Oh, that's a good idea. Let me think about that sometime," I'm actually going to say, "Okay, give me a comprehensive go-to-market plan for how to develop and launch idea number five, including OKRs for each--that's objectives and key results--for each member of my team." Anything else? I've just said do it in a separate canvas. See what it comes up with.
So, I want to--I want to touch on a couple things here. So just notice not only how long this is and how comprehensive it is. ChatGBT will always come up with things that are that look very credible on the surface, but there's so many little bits of context. The fact that it knows about BASB, it knows about the kinds of people we have in our ecosystem, has a realistic timeline. It knows about our some of our--our how our marketing works. It can assign for each member specifically not just their position, but their name on our team with some knowledge of how their performance is measured and what their current role is. I could go in here and add a lot more detail that would allow it to--to--to flush this out, but this is just fantastic as a V1 kind of first pass.
So, one thing I'm curious about is this development timeline. This seems to kind of be assuming typical human timelines, but I'm going to ask it: "Please revise the development timeline to take into account what's possible with AI instead of humans." Was it 3 days? So now it's an AI-accelerated timeline. So instead of weeks, it's days basically. So it's compressed a 12-week plan--so a 3-month plan--into just over a month, basically around 1/3 of the time. I could also have it go in and, you know, create that quiz, design the quiz even using code, design the email course and write the contents of it, develop a pricing model or different tiers and what's included under each one. It's like each bullet point on here could just be the beginning of an entire project for AI or chatGPT to complete on my behalf.
You have a--a background buying and selling various kinds of businesses. You've been doing that for many years. How have you been using your master prompt with AI? What kinds of tasks and--and projects do you use it for? Everything. So we design. So first thing we do is we'll design all of the processes for the business using AI. Um, so we actually did this even before AI and it was a 2-year process. Now it is a--the actual design is probably a one-month process. Obviously implementation, buy-in, all that still takes probably the same amount of time. Training our leadership teams on it. A lot of the functions on--uh, finance, on marketing for us, it's a shared service across multiple companies, and that's all really like 90% AI at this point. Um, we're testing out SDRs--so people taking calls--um, with AI agents, which even now is actually--it's more effective overall because your time to lead is seconds, even though, you know, the actual quality of the call may not be quite at the standard of a human, that time to lead makes up for it.
So, we did the process that you saw manually, step by step. Took us a couple hours, but we really wanted to make this much easier for you. So, we have created a 100% free custom GPT that has everything that you saw here already preloaded. The whole template, all of the different principles and tips and guidelines and dos and don'ts that Hayden generously gave to me are all packaged inside this custom GPT, which you can find in the description below. I really, really strongly urge you to check it out and to make at least that first version of your personal master prompt.
If you want to see how this applies to your specific business, we're running a program where Hayden and I work directly with business owners to build their master prompt. And then not just that, but to use that master prompt to radically improve every single major function within their organization. If you're interested in joining the next version of Second Brain Enterprise, I encourage you to sign up to our waitlist. The first cohort, which we're actually teaching right now, completely sold out. So, don't wait to do that.
Is there any other last words or pieces of advice you would give for people embarking on the first version of their master prompt? Just to do it. It's--it's one thing to watch, it's another thing to do it. Don't get overwhelmed with like all of the things you can do with AI. I think the key here is like the first step is just to use a tool, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude. Just use a tool every day and get as many reps in as possible prompting because you will be amazed how much better you get at--at it. And then how much more productive it makes you--much more productive. Like I'm way more than double in terms of what I can do. I can probably get three to five times more done at probably three to five times higher quality, more thorough, and my companies can just implement much more thorough systems than we possibly could have before.
In the next video in this master prompt series, we'll dive into three of the best practical use cases for your master prompt now that you have one. What part of your business would benefit most from an AI that actually understands your context? Tell me in the comments.