Transcription
Most people use ChatGPT at only 5% of its potential, but if you want to level up your life, you need to stop using it like everyone else. As a millionaire business owner, ChatGPT has become one of my most valuable thinking partners, helping me identify my blind spots and navigate complex situations I've never faced before. So, if you want to use ChatGPT to change your life, these are the four ways to use it better than everyone else. Let's start with number one.
Ask ChatGPT to show you your blind spots. One of the things that I like to do is to ask ChatGPT for insights about me, specifically areas that I might not see about myself that could be limiting to my goals, to my objectives, or to things that I'm just struggling in order to get movement around. And it's always interesting how ChatGPT responds. It compliments, of course, then acknowledges, but then gives me places where I might have a blind spot in a way that I approach something or the way that I'm looking at a specific situation in business.
Now, I would never have ChatGPT be my therapist. That is not its role. It should not have that data and it's really not for that purpose. But I'm never asking it to tell me what's wrong with me. I'm asking it, "What am I missing? And based on what you know about me, how can you help me navigate the situation?" You see, most people spend years repeating the same patterns without ever seeing them clearly. They get the same feedback from the same people around them. But because it's coming from friends or colleagues, it's often filtered. It's softened, and sometimes it's even biased. ChatGPT doesn't have an agenda. It is not trying to spare your feelings or manipulate you. So, when you've been feeding it context about how you think, how you work, and what you're trying to achieve, it can actually spot patterns that you are too close to see. And the scary part, the thing holding you back isn't usually something that you don't know how to do. It's something about how you're seeing the problem in the first place.
Just last week, I did exactly this. There was a business that we were looking at acquiring, and I had gone back and forth and tend to be the conservative one in our group. And when I'm the conservative one, I'm always pointing out the loopholes or the problems or the challenges. ChatGPT actually knows this about me. So when I ask for unfiltered feedback, it told me this and it knows that there are a handful of people that I really admire and would like to be more like. One of those people happened to be Elon Musk. And it used an Elon Musk analogy to tell me that I don't need to be conservative in this area because I've looked at the situation from every single angle and I should feel confident in pulling the trigger. This gave me the internal confidence to be like, "Yeah, it's right. I should pull the trigger on this because I know this to be true." But it gave me the insights of what it knows about me to give me the confidence in this particular situation.
So, here's how you actually do this. After you've been using ChatGPT for a while on a particular challenge, whether it's career stuff or some personal goal, stop and ask it directly based on everything I've shared with you about this situation. "What might I not be seeing? What assumptions am I making that could be limiting my options?" Or you could try, "Given how I typically approach problems like this, what's a perspective that I might be missing?" The key is you have to actually feed it enough context first. It needs to know how you think. And then when it shows you something uncomfortable, don't get defensive. That's the whole point. The blind spot isn't supposed to feel good when you find it. But facing it head-on will help you level up.
The next tip is one of my favorites. Train ChatGPT to match how your brain actually works. This might sound ridiculous, but I have my ChatGPT trained to give me complicated things in girly analogies, and it's honestly fantastic. It will give me math equations in terms of like a nail salon or explain the mechanics of financial systems using the analogy of a mall. I was recently on a call with a client who was talking about a preferred perpetual bond as it relates to his Bitcoin holdings and I had never heard of a preferred perpetual bond before. So I typed it into ChatGPT and this is the analogy that it gave to me. It first gives a summary of a preferred perpetual bond and it says it's a financial instrument that pays you consistent yield, never matures, sits between a bond and a stock in risk, gives priority over common stock shareholders, but never returns the principal unless the user chooses it to. So, all of that's great information, and I kind of contextually understand what this is, but this is how it uses a girly analogy. Picture this. You're in a situationship with a guy who never wants to break up, but also never wants to marry you. That's a preferred perpetual bond. You get steady gifts every month, aka the coupon payments. Think flowers, massages, or monthly Sephora hauls. But he never commits to an end date, so it's perpetual. There's no engagement. There's no timeline. Just vibes forever. You're not the main wife, meaning the common equity. And he can ghost gifts temporarily, aka callable or deferable dividends, but he actually does have to make it up later. Think of it like this. I'm sorry, babe. Here's everything I owe and a spa day. And you can't force the breakup. Think the bondholder can't demand the principal back. So, you can't say when you get the money back. He decides if and when he buys you out.
So, what has just happened? Something that is traditionally complex that you might not understand how it exactly works is now given back to you in an analogy that you understand. Now, this is a particularly girly analogy, but it can run the whole gamut of nails to Sephora hauls to a full glam squad analogy, which is so helpful for me to truly understand what it's talking about. Why? My brain doesn't think in bonds or financial markets every day. My brain thinks in the things that I enjoy while I'm learning things that I'm also interested in. So ChatGPT merges these for me. So it feels like a fun and interesting way to learn something that I am interested in using topics that I already understand. The old way of learning is over. Most people try to learn the way they think that they're supposed to. They read a technical textbook explanation. They watch a lecture. And then they feel stupid when it doesn't click. But your brain already has a filing system. It already has reference points and frameworks that make sense to you. When you force yourself to learn in someone else's framework, you're adding an unnecessary translation layer. It's slower. It's harder. And most importantly, it doesn't stick. The best learners don't try to rewire their brains to match the content. They rewire the content to match exactly how their brain works.
So, here's how to put this into practice. Think of the types of analogies, examples, or frameworks that naturally make sense to you. Maybe it's sports analogies, could be cooking, could be relationships or nature or fashion or music production. Then when you're asking ChatGPT to explain something complex, then go into your ChatGPT settings where it says personalize and in the prompt where it asks you to give additional information about how you want data, type in what type of analogies you want to hear. The more that you train it to speak your language, the faster you'll actually absorb new information instead of just passively consuming it.
Next up is to use ChatGPT to decode what you don't understand in real time. I'm in meetings all the time and sometimes I don't understand everything people are discussing. Sometimes it's an entirely new business model that I might not fully grasp. Or there are other times where it is a completely new field I haven't studied yet. And I used to just sit there thinking, wait, how does this work with this? And what is this connected to? And what about this exchange over here? Now, it's worth saying that you always have to tell somebody when you're recording them. So, don't just start recording conversations and not let people know. It's the wrong thing to do. But this has been instrumental to me because I can go back to these meetings, relive the conversation with full comprehension. I also do this with podcasts. One of my favorite podcasts is All-In and half the time I have no clue what they're talking about. It's very AI and tech-focused and I don't understand many of the words that they're using. So, I've trained ChatGPT to summarize the notes from those podcasts. But more importantly, it pulls out any words or concepts from the transcript that I don't understand. And now I've trained it to deliver this to me in my inbox before I listen to the episode. So, I'm able to look at all the words and concepts ahead of time so I can fully track with what they're saying in the episode. And instead of feeling like I'm dumb and that people are smarter than me, I'm prepared and can fully track with the conversation that I'm trying to be a part of.
When you can decode complexity in real time, you don't have to wait years to build expertise. You could step into rooms and conversations that used to be above your level and actually contribute. So here's how to apply this. Anytime you're in a conversation, a meeting, or even watching a video where you encounter concepts that you don't fully understand, record it. Then feed the transcript into ChatGPT with this prompt: "I just listened to a conversation about blah. Pull out every term, concept, or reference I might not understand and explain each one simply. Then summarize the key points in a way that assumes I now understand those terms." You could also ask, "What questions should I have asked in this conversation if I wanted to demonstrate understanding and engage at a higher level?" This doesn't just help you understand a current topic. It teaches you what sophisticated inquiry looks like in any domain. Within a few months of doing this consistently, you will notice you're walking into complex conversations with confidence because your baseline knowledge has expanded exponentially.
The final ChatGPT hack is to use it to force yourself to actually learn. There's a real problem happening right now with AI. People just assume that they have this resource, so they rarely actually have to know anything themselves. The knowledge is just always at their fingertips. So why bother remembering it? But here's what they don't realize. If you don't actually know things, you're not getting any smarter or able to contribute at a higher level. It's simply information in, information out. It doesn't help you reason or be more strategic in life. It's just an answer to a question. So you end up losing your own knowledge and your ability to truly strategize because you start thinking that it knows better than you. But it doesn't. And it's not in every conversation and you are not a robot with it feeding you information 24/7. So imagine if you were in a complex conversation about capital structures and you knew that you can ask ChatGPT at any point in time whatever you would need to know about capital structures. But if you don't actually know that information when you're talking in a high-stakes environment at a meeting where a decision needs to be made, you're having to consult this outside thing instead of you knowing the material that you've now learned.
You see, I use ChatGPT all the time to help me learn new things. But here's the critical difference in how I use it. I force it to quiz me. I don't just ask it questions and trust that it knows and will always be there. I make it test whether I actually understand what I'm learning. Think about it like this. ChatGPT is a tool that responds to the quality of your questions and the depth of your thinking. If you don't have a foundational understanding, you can't ask sophisticated follow-up questions. You can't challenge its answers. You can't direct it strategically. You end up sounding smart in the moment, parodying what AI told you, but you have no actual understanding beneath the surface. And the moment someone asks you to explain further or to apply that knowledge in a new context, you're exposed.
So, here's how to actually become smarter with ChatGPT. After you learn something new using ChatGPT, immediately tell it, "Quiz me on what we just covered. Ask me five questions that test whether I actually understand this, not whether I can repeat it back." Or you can try this one: "Create a scenario where I need to apply this concept and see if I can work through it without your help first." If you can't answer the questions or work through the scenario, you didn't actually learn it. You just had a nice conversation. Make ChatGPT hold you accountable for actually knowing the thing, not just having access to the thing. This is the difference between using AI to get smarter versus using AI to pretend that you're smarter.
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