56 Yr Old Professional — Best Practices — ChatGPT — Last 12 Months (2023–2024)
In February 2023, I was godsmacked with ChatGPT. I waited to get my free ChatGPT account. What could this tool do?
In two phrases— synthesizing information and learning faster.
Feb-May 2023: It was slow. You only had so many responses before you timed out. I learned how to ask it questions. I made mistakes assuming general questions would give me specific answers (e.g., how does a car work). LESSON ONE: ChatGPT works in prompts or questions. The more detailed, logical, and sequential your prompts or questions are the better the answer.
May-December 2023: Now it was fast. I was paying $20 per month for the fast and robust version. If you don’t, you are silly and short sighted. I learned about context and inference with my questions. ChatGPT is a machine following rules. Unlike when I talk to a professor or consultant who can infer or ask questions around context to my problems/inquires, ChatGPT cannot. It needs to be prompted, like a 4 year old. LESSON TWO: ChatGPT knows nothing about (!) what you know, (!!) need to know, (!!!) want to know, or (!V) when or even (V) how. Give it context to your prompts, queries, and questions.
[side note: Listening to Jesse Cook on Spotify. Tasty music]
Bonus Best Practices
Knowledge: The more you know about a subject, from all persons perspectives, the better ChatGPT will give you answers solving problems. For example, you sell trustee services to financial advisors and need to solve a problem around how financial advisors learn in a modern fin-tech system balancing human and virtual interactions under the construct that the majority of financial advisors react to problems around trust planning and trustee choices. See, that’s knowledge I have about an industry, my client base and context. The more knowledge you have the more powerful ChatGPT will be. It rewards the curious and knowledge worker. Not the intellectual lazy.
Time: Learning anything new is a pain in the neck. I don’t care how old or young you are. I have high school and college kids. They aren’t taking the time to learn the synthesizing tools of ChatGPT. It takes time. I spend time on ChatGPT learning how it works and doesn’t work versus watching the Sopranos. Kinda like exercising, you get what you put in.
Goals: If you are not a knowledge worker — ChatGPT is a waste of time. General statement, but pretty close to being accurate. For example, ChatGPT can read PDF documents and analyze them based on your prompts. If you job requires reading PDF documents, synthesizing the information, and processing next steps on that information, would it make sense to learn standard prompts to save 30% of your time?
Accuracy: ChatGPT makes shit up. Its references to the web are not accurate. It can be lazy. For example, Look up datasets on demographic growth in the state of Kansas between 1980 to 2000. ChatGPT will give you a simple query and look up, if anything. Researching information takes some noodling and prep work with your prompts. Better to use Bing with AI for a list of websites. Another example, it will literally make stuff up — Henry VIII didn’t intend to have several wives which in fact is a historical misfact. You need to really know your subject, context and issues for ChatGPT not to fed you garbage. TIP: You can tell ChatGPT to be a HenryVIII academic historical expert as [put name and reference of such a person] and that all analysis, discussions, and answers need to follow being a Henry VIII expert like [put name and reference of such a person]. And, add that if ChatGPT doesn’t understand these parameters it will ask questions versus making up or hallucinating on anything.
Bottom line: ChatGPT is a synthesizing tool and helps one learn faster. I have zero experience with writing code or other technical aspects.
“Do or do not. There is no try.” Yoda, Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back.
Cheers,
