(2023-11-30) Armstrong How I Use Chatgptas A Reasonable Person

Evan Armstrong: How I Use ChatGPT (As a Reasonable Person). We built a GPT chatbot that we think can solve a significant problem for founders. It’s called Founder’s Friend, it’s free for all ChatGPT subscribers, and it’s available here.

They include emotional cajoling, prompt construction, and a slight shift in your thinking

In this piece I focus on ChatGPT, but these improvements are applicable across most AI tools.

Let’s say that every day I have 100 thoughts. Some of these will be routine

These might be 20%

Other thoughts will be big, important ideas I can publish in this newsletter

These might only be 5%

But the least useful thoughts—the ones that eat up the remaining 75% of my intellectual labor—are the daily thoughts that are helpful but not differentiated.

These are questions like, “How many grams of protein are in my dinner tonight?”... ChatGPT allows you to automate tedious thoughts. Whenever you are mildly curious about a question or annoyed at not having a piece of information, you can delegate that labor to ChatGPT. (It seems like accuracy would matter on most of these things, which ChatGPT is bad at.)

You can also outsource low-leverage thoughts beyond questions you used to Google and use it for works of simple analysis. I’ve been arguing since this summer that finance workflows, which is labor that mostly consists of undifferentiated analysis outsourced to low-cost analysts, are ripe for disruption. Want to make a chart? Upload it to ChatGPT and tell the system what you want. Have a question from a dataset? Again, just upload it, and the AI will usually get it right.

The magic happens, however, when you combine low-level analysis with simple questions.

I can give the report’s URL to ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the information I need. For example, I wanted to know what type of content was performing the best. Five seconds later, I have my answer.

This is not enough information for me to make wholesale changes to my own content strategy. But it is enough to get me started and thinking differentiated thoughts.

My productivity gains haven’t come from doing less work, but from doing more work faster—because I don’t have to waste my time on analysis that I can’t use to differentiate my end product.

The first big mental unlock for me was thinking about ChatGPT as an intern. Just like when you tell an intern to do something, you sometimes have to manipulate their emotions, so, too, with these systems. Research has shown a 10.9% performance improvement when you use an emotional stimulus like, “This is very important to my career,” when delegating a task. And just like with an intern, sometimes you’ll get better results by being rude

just writing something like, “This result sucks. Can you do it better?” will yield a better output. You can do that over and over again, getting a progressively better result

You can also generate significant improvements by asking the system what it needs to perform better

What details do you need from me to make the email great?

You can use Custom Instructions to input details that will provide context for all your prompts. My CEO Dan Shipper has an incredible in-depth guide on this feature, but essentially you can go into ChatGPT’s settings and delineate important facts about your life

by combining emotional cajoling, Custom Instructions, and relevant data, I have found at least a 50% improvement in the quality of the AI’s outputs.

But beyond the analysis and the emotional cajoling lies the true magic.

Modality magic

The other day I got into an argument with my CEO Dan and my editor Kate

Thankfully, OpenAI recently released a voice mode for ChatGPT that perfectly suited the bill. I popped in my Airpods, told the AI, “Hey, I need to vent for a minute,” and then did just that.

It was one of the more cathartic technological experiences I have ever had. Something about moving from typing out my feelings to saying them out loud was incredible.

Founder’s Friend

*When you combine all of this—the low-leverage insights, the performance improvements, the voice—you get a truly profound product. It is a flexible, independent problem solver.

To prove it, the team at Every and I are proud to launch Founder’s Friend—a GPT bot to solve a real problem for entrepreneurs.*

The trick lies in not expecting these tools to do your thinking for you. Instead, you need to leverage them to bulldoze through the mundane, leaving you more room to flex your intellectual muscles on the stuff that matters.