🤖 One prompt to copy into ChatGPT

I have written this newsletter three times a week for forty-seven weeks now. People sometimes ask where the ideas come from, as though there is a room I go into. There is no room. There is a process, it is the same one every time, and it is genuinely boring. That is the part nobody mentions when they talk about writing.

By the end of this, you will:

On Saturday the nine questions gave you an outline. If you have not got to that one yet, no matter: any heading you could write about will do. On Tuesday I made the case for what an outline is for: a small list of people who want to hear from you, which collects around somebody who is useful about one specific thing.

An outline is not useful to anybody yet. It is a set of headings. What earns an email address is usually a short guide that solves one small problem for somebody.

So today you write the first piece of it. Not the whole thing. One section.

And here is the part that matters more than the writing: you are about to run a process you will run again. Same three steps, next section, next week, next guide. Nothing new to learn the second time.

Before you paste anything in, it helps to know what you are actually dealing with.

ChatGPT can look things up now. Ask it something current and it will search the web and show you links. But most of what it hands you is not looked up at all. It works by predicting the next likely word, over and over, until it has a paragraph.

That is the awkward part. You cannot always tell which of the two you just got.

MIT Technology Review explained the mechanism. Put plainly: these tools invent everything they produce, and we only call it a mistake when we happen to notice it is wrong.

That sounds alarming until you turn it around. Predicting likely words is a poor way to get a fact. It is an excellent way to take material you already supplied and arrange it into readable sentences.

So the rule is simple, and it holds for everything you will ever ask it:

Give it your material. Ask for one specific job. Read what comes back and cut anything that was not yours.

Ask it for facts and you are gambling. Ask it to shape what you already know and you are using it for the one thing it is genuinely good at, on material you happen to be the expert on. You are better placed than anybody to catch a wrong sentence, because it is your subject.

Open ChatGPT. Paste this in, with your own outline in place of the brackets.

Then three things:

That is the whole process. You have now done it once.

Do it again on Saturday with the second section and it will take you less time, because you are not learning anything new. You are repeating something you already did.

If you run this today, you end up with a few hundred words that did not exist this morning, in your voice, on a subject you know. Do it a handful more times and you have a short guide. That guide is the sort of thing people hand over an email address for.

If you do not, nothing is lost. The outline keeps. It will still be there next week, and so will this prompt.

If you run the prompt, reply with one word: the section heading you started with. If it came back rubbish, send the word anyway and that tells me something too. I read every one.

Talk soon,
Bob

A quick tip from my place – the one phone setting that makes everything easier to read. No sales in it.

Here is an AI tool you do not have to learn – you simply talk, and Wispr Flow turns your words into clean, finished text in almost any app.

This link goes to my own review on my site, which includes my affiliate link. I use Wispr Flow myself every day. I am a slow typer who makes plenty of typos, and it saves me a great deal of time. There is a free version, and if you ever move to a paid plan through it, I may earn a small amount, at no extra cost to you.