These AI Hacks Will Get You Ridiculously Ahead of Most People (Q&A)

Fourteen questions I get asked constantly about AI, and the exact steps and tools I’d use to answer every one of them.

“How do I give AI all the context it needs without typing so much?”

I talk three times faster than I type. So whether it’s a chat tool, a coding platform or an agent, I’m talking and having it transcribed. I use Wispr Flow because it lives on my phone keyboard and on my laptop, and everything I dictate feeds my AI brain so it gets smarter.

Then I flip the script. Instead of guessing what the AI needs from me, I make it pull from me. Add this to the end of every prompt:

“Ask me questions if you need more context.”

I use Claude for this because of the built-in ask user tool. It breaks its question down into two or three steps and gives you multiple choice, a checklist, a priority list, even an “other” box where you can type a better answer than the ones it offered you.

“Why does AI keep giving me generic answers?”

Because of how it works. It’s trained on nearly everything ever created, so by default it condenses and averages the best answer across all of it. Average in, average out.

The fix is specificity in the prompt. I use a framework called MAPS.

1. M is for Mission. What’s the goal behind the task? “I need to get more customers.”
2. A is for Ask. What specifically do you need it to do? “Generate me a list of leads I can call on.” “Build me a landing page so I can capture emails.” Most people give the prompt only this part, which is exactly why the answers come back generic.
3. P is for Parameters. Everything you know about your situation. Past clients, scripts that have worked, your numbers. You can hand it two or three full books worth of information. Most people give it a paragraph. If you don’t have documents ready, this is where you pick up the voice tool and just talk at it like crazy.
4. S is for Shape. The format of the output. Spreadsheet? Bulleted list? Short and tight?

No specific tool here, because MAPS applies to literally every AI. One tip: I use Perplexity when I want the same question answered by different models side by side. It’s like having a council of AI models and taking the best reply.

“How do I stop explaining who I am in every new chat?”

Every new chat starts at zero. It’s like talking to a stranger every single time.

I used to teach something called the master prompt, where you’d sit there and answer a pile of questions. We don’t have to do that anymore.

1. Connect the tools where the information about you already lives. Your email. Your Google Drive. Maybe Notion, maybe Slack. All of it is rich with who you are, what you’re working on, who’s in your life.
2. Then tell it: “Build the most detailed master prompt of who I am from all this information. If you have any questions, ask me.”
3. Fix what it gets wrong. It’ll build 90% of it, and it will hallucinate a few things. Make your edits and save it.
4. Paste it into your settings so every new chat starts with it. Then copy that same master prompt into every other AI tool you use.

Five minutes of setup. After that the answers come back like they’re from a consultant who has known you for years.

I use Claude for this for two reasons. As of today it has the best memory system, so the more I give it, the more it remembers and the better it uses it. And it’s built by Anthropic. When I looked at every other AI and asked who I trust most with my financial information and internal documents, that mattered. Some of them are free, and you’re paying with your data.

“How can I use AI to learn things faster?”

This is probably my number one use case, every day. A course I have to follow in order might take me weeks. A book takes me days. Even then I’m not learning against the problem I actually have.

With AI I can learn a topic in under 30 minutes.

1. “Go find the best resources on this topic.” YouTube videos, books, courses, events. Tell it recent stuff only. There’s no point learning AI from somebody five years ago.
2. “Now build me a learning plan from these and teach them to me.” I don’t need to read a whole book to learn one specific thing, so I skip to the parts that matter.

My daily tool for this is NotebookLM. It’s made by Google, it’s free, and it pulls from PDFs, websites and YouTube, which is the number one teacher in the world. It builds a custom AI you can chat with about the topic. It’ll make a podcast you can listen to, and you can call in and ask questions to the AI voice. It builds presentations. It builds a video overview. It’ll even make flashcards and a quiz so you can see how well you actually know the thing.

I’m not making this up. Go try it.

“I want AI to help me set five-year goals, but where do I start?”

We can’t hit a target we can’t see, and most goals are vague. Make more money. Get healthier. Grow a family. None of that is specific enough for the AI, or for you.

1. Ask it to help you define five-year SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Use the acronym in the prompt and it’ll map the output to it.
2. Answer its questions out loud with any tool that records your voice. I use Wispr Flow. Much faster than typing.
3. Make it visual, because our brains think in pictures, not words. Here’s the prompt: “Describe what my life looks like when I hit that goal. Tell me about the sights, the sounds, the details, the feelings. Then turn that into a hyper realistic image.” That’s your vision board.

Pro tip: ask it to redo the image vertical, at the size of your phone wallpaper. Now you’re looking at your five-year goals a hundred times a day.

I’ve always kept a vision board and I always update it. I’m just using AI more and more to make it crystal clear. Best tools for this right now are the ChatGPT image tool and Nano Banana inside Google’s Gemini.

“How do I use AI to actually stick to my goals?”

Willpower breaks. Systems don’t. So the question is what system makes the goal inevitable, and the big one is being able to see the progress, because seeing progress is what makes you feel the momentum.

1. Give the AI your goals.
2. Have it build a written plan with the specific timelines and the things you’d have to do to get there.
3. Ask it for a daily dashboard. The goal at the top, the daily activities underneath, and you enter your numbers every day.
4. Color code it. If I’m more than 10% below the activity it needs to see from me, red, I’m not on track. Within 10%, yellow. On track, green.

Pro tip: ask it to turn that dashboard into an app on your phone. This one’s advanced. You can build a web page and save it to your home screen, or build a real mobile app.

I use Codex for this, built by OpenAI. It’s really good at code, really good at math, and really good at visuals. That last part matters here, because if the information is ugly and confusing nobody opens it every day. Make it pretty and gamified and you’ll be in there daily.

“Can AI plan my calendar around my goals?”

Our goals are the byproduct of where we spend our time. That’s why everything in my life goes in my calendar. It’s how I audit what I’ve actually been up to, and when the goals don’t materialize I can ask what needs to change in there.

Most founders have about 10 hours a week on their calendar doing things they don’t need to be doing.

1. Connect your calendar to your AI. Watching it analyze everything you’ve been up to is worth it on its own.
2. Give it your goals for this quarter.
3. Run this prompt: “Using my goals, look at my calendar like you’re a ruthless mentor. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Argue with me about where I need to restructure my time and tell me why, based on what’s best for my goals, not what I want right now.”

It needs both pieces to work: the data in your calendar, and the goals.

Pro tip: I wrote a whole Wall Street Journal bestselling book on this called Buy Back Your Time. Have it study the book and do what I teach in there, because there are things I can’t get to here that it already knows.

I use Claude for this because of the connector tool and the memory system. It already knows my goals from the master prompt. And it doesn’t stop at reading my schedule, it tells me what’s wrong with it. It’ll say you’re spending a lot of time here, but you have this goal and this person on your team, so maybe ask them to take over that meeting.

“How do I get AI to write emails that actually sound like me?”

You know when an email is AI written. The dashes, the phrasing, all of it. They know, you know. Let’s fix that.

1. Connect your email, Gmail or Outlook, to your AI tool.
2. Ask it to go through your emails, analyze them, and write a document that teaches other AIs to write emails just like you. You write completely differently to your boss than you do to your friends, and it can understand the difference. What comes out is a tone document, or a skill.
3. Have it update that document off your Gmail whenever you need it refreshed.

I use Claude here. My email has a lot of sensitive data in it, so I’d rather that sit with Anthropic. And Claude has been the best copywriter out there for a long time now.

“How do I get AI to do my repetitive tasks without me asking every day?”

Repetitive work is where AI shines. My rule comes out of software: DRY. Don’t repeat yourself. The moment you catch yourself doing something twice, stop.

1. Find the thing you do every week or every day. One-offs don’t count. If you’ll only ever do it once, who cares.
2. Record yourself doing it, talking out loud as you go.
3. Ask the AI to turn that recording into a skill.
4. Put it on a schedule.

ChatGPT has a record and replay feature now. Hit the plus icon, tell it you’re going to record something you want automated, and it takes your screen, records everything you do, and creates the skill. I use Claude and plenty of the others too, but most of them take over your whole screen while they work and you sit there watching your computer finish the task. This one captures it once and then runs behind the scenes. Set it and forget it.

“My notes and ideas are everywhere. How do I organize them?”

A few years ago this meant sitting there manually pulling things out of Google Drive into Notion, or moving videos from Vimeo over to Dropbox. Days of work.

1. Pick one place for all of it. People call this a home database. That becomes the brain behind every other system, the thing the AI learns from.
2. Point your other AI tools at that one place.
3. Have an agent maintain it. This is the pro move. I use apex.host, and there’s Hermes and OpenClaw too. Every night my agent runs processes to delete files that don’t need to exist, connect the things that should be connected, and file things where other agents can reach them.

My team runs Notion for all our corporate stuff. I take that plus everything else and save it into Obsidian, which sits on my agent machine with access to my decisions, my knowledge, my relationships, podcast interviews, conversations with my team, strategic documents. That’s why when I talk to my AI, the answers are specific.

If you’re a bit nerdy, Obsidian. If you’re just starting off, Notion is easier to get going.

“How do I use AI to keep track of my business finances?”

Financials are tricky. The information usually isn’t structured properly, most accounting software has no strong AI in it, and most entrepreneurs don’t like tracking everything in the first place. Garbage in, garbage out.

Do it right and you should be able to ask anything about your money, personal or professional, and get an answer on the spot.

1. Connect all of it. Bank statements, payment systems, everything you use financially.
2. Ask real questions. Do I have enough cash to make this hire? What’s my current burn rate? How many months of inventory do I have?
3. Ask for it visually. Graphs, spreadsheets, a picture of how things are moving in the business.

You can build this yourself and it might take you months. I use HelloFrank.ai. Full transparency, it’s one of my venture companies. We built it internally, then my friends saw how we were using it and wanted access, so we brought it public. It acts like a full time CFO I’m not spending 10 or 15 grand a month on, it’s certified and secure, and it connects straight to the bank accounts. My favorite feature is the daily cash email: it pulls the cash position of every business I’m involved in and tells me how the money is moving and what I should focus on.

In business, speed is the thing. I want to ask a question and have it answered in seconds.

“I save AI tutorials on Instagram and never implement them. What do I do?”

Shelf help. You collect things for the someday when you’ll finally get to them. I’m the same way, reels saved everywhere. It feels productive. Honestly it’s organized procrastination.

1. Grab the link next time you see one.
2. Paste it into your AI and ask: “Is this useful for me?” It knows your goals. It knows your calendar. It knows what systems you’ve built so far. Let it judge.
3. Tell it to apply it wherever it sees necessary.
4. Automate the whole loop. Call it something like Instagram ingestion. Now every time the AI sees an Instagram or TikTok link it runs that skill, and you never re-explain yourself.

I send mine to apex.host. My agent is called Kai, and I want Kai to know everything going on in my life even if I go implement it somewhere else. He’s the genius sidekick.

“What’s the best AI assistant out there?”

As the guy who wrote the book on training an assistant, the AI version is way more fun. They don’t sleep. They don’t take vacations. They don’t complain. You never have to swap them out.

Here’s how you build one.

1. Get all the APIs for your different systems and connect them to your AI.
2. Set up a harness, an agent that keeps everything running so it can monitor your calendar, monitor your email, look at what people are sending you on Slack.
3. Give it an identity. How it should behave, the rules it follows, the security parameters so you don’t lose your information.

If that sounds overwhelming, it’s the exact reason my team and I built two tools that come out of the box, so you’re not configuring and securing all of it yourself.

If you’re a CEO leading a big team and your problem is clarity, that’s single player mode. That’s apex.host, and that’s my Kai. I ask it about marketing campaigns, my calendar, personal tasks, goals, projects. I have it go investigate things. I even have it call team members for updates.

If you want to power up the team, that’s multiplayer mode, and that’s Precision. It pulls all the company data into one source of truth, then your team builds dashboards and scoreboards, executes tasks, and runs it right out of Slack.

Full transparency on both, these are my companies. I use Precision to run my companies and Apex for me.

“I get error messages when writing code and have no idea what they mean.”

Show the problem to the AI. If it knows what the problem is, it can solve it.

1. Make the error visible. Sometimes you’re building an app and there’s an error you can’t see. Tell your code: “Create an error window I can screenshot to tell you what I’m seeing when it’s broken.”
2. Screenshot it and feed it back. “Fix it.”

I use Claude Code most of the time. And I’m a bit of a geek, so when Claude isn’t doing what I need, I’ll screenshot the whole project and take it to Grok or Codex to see if it comes up with a better answer. Two different models trying to fix each other’s work gets me the best outcome.

Pick one

That was a lot. Tools will change, trust me. Come back in 90 days and my list might look different. The principles never will.

Most people watch something like this and do nothing with it. You’re still here, which means you actually want to get better at this.

So pick one. One tool, one path from this list, and implement it today.

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