General advice

  • Buy a paid AI subscription of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for quality and privacy. The frontier models are much better than the free models, and your data isn’t used to train the models. This is the best $20/month you can spend.
  • Have 50 conversations a day with AI. High-usage forces you to find tiny use-cases you’d otherwise ignore.
  • If you don’t know what to ask, have it interview you. Ask the AI to interview you to find out what you want, and then do it for you.
  • Use it for validation. LLMs can make mistakes, but using it to fact-check books, articles, emails, your work, etc. is safe and effective.
  • Have AI cross-check AI. Ask it to find all the mistakes it made and give you citations. Have another AI find all the errors. They’re pretty good at that.
  • Use voice mode on mobile to talk to the AI while walking or thinking. “Ramble” at the AI - it can structure your thoughts. This capitalizes on dead time (e.g. commuting) and also lets you dump context and thoughts faster than you type.
  • You’ve hired an intern. Don’t treat it like a search engine. It’s as smart as a post-graduate intern - smarter than the average professional in many domains. Give it bigger tasks. Verify its work and correct it (“You missed this part, try again.”)
  • Vibe code your own software. As a non-technical person, build apps to solve your own problems. Don’t learn to code. Just tell AI tools what you want and have them build it.
  • Have it write code to process numbers. LLMs are bad at math but good at writing code. Tell it to write code to analyze numbers instead of answering directly.
  • Have it rewrite your prompts (meta-prompting). If you aren’t getting the results you want, have it tell you what’s missing and rewrite your prompt for you.

Here are specific ideas you can try:

  • Mine your digital exhaust. Export your WhatsApp chats, journal entries, email logs, fitness data, bank statements, etc. and feed them to an LLM. Ask it to find patterns in your behavior, identify your blind spots, or summarize your year.
  • Read papers, books, and attachments. Have it rewrite in the style of your favorite author (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell) to make dry content more engaging. Add “ELI15” (Explain Like I’m 15) for simplicity.
  • Use it when stuck. When you hit a mental wall, use it as a thinking partner. Have it give a first draft, ask it to interview you, ask what an expert or a person you admire would do, or just ramble your thoughts to it.
  • Hire an expert. It has been trained on the entire Internet and all books. You can hire it as a personal financial advisor, career coach, relationship counselor, or fitness trainer, and more. For example, hire as a:
    • Doctor. Have it summarize your health history, identify gaps, and suggest questions to ask your doctor.
    • Detective. Ask it to find out what happened to a long-lost friend or what a client has been up to.
    • Financial advisor. Ask it to interview your about your finances, goals, and risk tolerance, then research a personalized investment plan.
    • Relationship Architect. Ask it whom to reach out to, find their interests, what gifts to buy, etc.
    • Teacher. Ask AI to teach, then quiz you. “I want to learn about [Topic]. Explain the basics, then ask me 3 questions to test if I understood it.”