You already have ChatGPT. It keeps handing you something generic and you keep going back to work. That is not a you problem, and it is not a tool problem. You are typing one-line questions into an empty box. Three rules that fix that, and ten plays you run yourself, each with the exact words to paste.
This part is the whole thing. The ten plays are just the demonstration of it. Get these three and you will fix your own prompts for the rest of your life.
Smart, fast, tireless, and it knows nothing about your business. You would never email a new hire “write me a marketing plan” and expect anything usable. You would sit them down and explain the business first.
Bad prompts are almost never badly worded. They are context starved. Feed it who you are, what you charge, who you serve, and what you sound like, and the same question comes back a different animal.
The first answer is a draft, not a delivery. Say what is wrong with it: too long, too corporate, that price is wrong, you forgot the commercial side of my business, cut it in half.
Three rounds of that beats any perfectly engineered first prompt. Most people treat it like Google and quit after one try. That single habit is where the disappointment comes from.
It is fluent when it is wrong, and it sounds exactly the same as when it is right. There is no wobble in the voice to warn you.
So: it drafts, you approve. Anything carrying a number, a date, a legal term, or a promise to a customer gets your eyes before it leaves your hands. Everything else, use freely. The rule is what makes the freedom safe.
Every other play in this manual assumes you have done this one. Do it before you read further and the other nine work. Skip it and they hand you the average of everybody in your trade.
The highest-leverage ten minutes of your year. One document that describes your business, kept on your desktop, pasted into the top of every future AI conversation. It is the difference between advice for a generic company in your trade and advice for yours.
Do not sit down and write it. Nobody ever finishes that document. Have the AI interview you instead, because answering twelve questions out loud is easy and staring at a blank page is not.
You are going to help me write a reference document about my business that I will paste into future AI conversations so you always know who I am. Interview me one question at a time. Do not move to the next question until my answer is specific, and push back when I am vague. Cover: what we sell and what we charge; who our best customer is and who is a bad fit; the towns we serve; what makes us different from the three competitors I will name; the words we use and the words we never use; the five questions customers ask most; and the one thing about this business an outsider always gets wrong. Ask about 12 questions total. Then write the finished document in plain language, under two pages, from my point of view.
It names your prices, your town, your competitors and your pet peeves. If it could describe any company in your trade, it is not finished. Send it back and answer harder.
Same format as play 01: the job, the exact prompt, and what a good answer looks like. Tell me where to send it and the rest of the manual opens on this page.
Most owners get further with one of these in an hour beside somebody else than in a month of meaning to. If you are near Gainesville, there is a free session every Wednesday at 10:00 AM at The Mission Coffee. Bring a laptop, bring the thing you have been avoiding, and build one of these for real. No charge, no pitch, and nobody sits and watches.
Not local, or not the type? Then just run play 01 today. Ten minutes, and the other nine start working.