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Hi reader,

My social media feed is packed with “AI experts” telling me how to use ChatGPT. Some of it’s useful, but a lot of it is just noise.

But now we’ve got advice straight from the source. OpenAI President Greg Brockman recently shared his best tips for crafting the perfect ChatGPT prompt. If anyone knows how to get better results, it’s him.

Here’s what he said and how you can use it to make ChatGPT work better for you.

Today’s advice to grow your business

Include these four things in every ChatGPT prompt for better results…

If you use ChatGPT in any capacity, you'd better make sure you’re doing it right. Here are the four things Brockman says* to include in every prompt:

1. State your goal. Be super specific and clear about what you want. Instead of asking for “marketing ideas,” say, “Give me 10 social media content ideas for a local coffee shop that focus on community engagement.” 

2. Specify the format. Do you want a step-by-step guide, a list, a comparison table, or something else? Example: “Give me these ideas in a bullet point list, with a one-sentence explanation for each.”

3. Set guardrails. If accuracy matters, you need to say so, i.e., “Only include proven strategies that have worked in the real world.” Or, if you want to avoid generic responses, say: “No vague suggestions; only actionable, creative ideas.”

4. Provide context ( lots of it). Dump any relevant details to help ChatGPT understand your situation. Brockman calls it a ‘dump’ because you should mention anything relevant that comes to mind. 

*You can read the full interview with Brockman here.

Here’s how this will benefit you

You’ll get higher-quality results with AI.

ChatGPT can only give you good results if you give it good instructions. If your prompt is vague or unclear, the AI fills in the gaps with generic, surface-level responses. But when you structure your prompt correctly, you eliminate the guesswork.

And instead of guessing how to do that, you now have a formula straight from the guy who helped build it! This is as close as it gets to a guaranteed way to make AI work better for you. Use it to your advantage. 

You’ll spend less time fixing AI’s mistakes.

One of the biggest frustrations with AI-generated content is that it often requires a ton of tweaking. Instead of saving time, you end up rewriting half of it just to make it usable. That’s because AI doesn’t know what you want unless you tell it.. A weak prompt leaves too much room for interpretation, which leads to generic, inaccurate, or just plain weird results. 

But when you follow the right prompt structure, you give ChatGPT all the details it needs upfront. The AI understands your goal, your preferred format, any constraints, and the full context of what you’re looking for. This way, you get something much closer to what you actually need right away. 

Your first step

Try this prompt structure with ChatGPT right now.

Open ChatGPT and try writing a prompt using all four of the elements: your goal, the format you want, guardrails, and relevant context. Pick something you’d normally ask AI for (i.e., an email, a social media post, etc.) and see how much better the response is when you give clearer instructions. 

Bonus tip: Try setting up Custom Instructions to make your ChatGPT results more personalized. Just click on your profile icon in the top right corner and click on “Custom Instructions.” Then, you can add any specific details or instructions that will be applied to all future responses, saving you even more time.

Try it out and let me know how it goes! 

Best,

Jono

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