9 AI Skills You MUST Have to Get Ahead of 99% of People
In this solo presentation, Dan Martell argues that mastering a specific set of AI skills is the key to outperforming the vast majority of people. Drawing on six years of experience building companies, internal AI tools, and teaching millions, he outlines nine practical skills: (1) Prompt Engineering – crafting role‑based, contextual, command‑rich, and formatted prompts, with example cheat codes; (2) Taste Curation – building a personal library of world‑class examples, refining communication, and codifying universal rules to recognize quality; (3) Master Prompt – creating a comprehensive, role‑specific PDF that serves as a digital identity for any AI platform; (4) Output Iteration – repeatedly fighting with AI, giving precise feedback, using Canvas for granular edits, and locking refined outputs; (5) System Prompts – writing reusable, language‑based instructions that program AI behavior, saving them as PDFs, and turning them into custom GPTs for team sharing; (6) AI as a Critic – prompting AI to act as a devil’s advocate, break down criticism via first‑principles, and feeding insights back into the master prompt; (7) Context Compression – summarizing massive data (e.g., millions of words) into concise, high‑density context via targeted summarization and missing‑info checks; (8) Knowledge‑Base Gardening – organizing projects, master prompts, compressed contexts, and system prompts into clearly named folders and PDFs for future‑proofing across AI platforms; (9) Personalized Learning – using AI to generate short, grade‑level research narratives that can be listened to on the go, turning AI into a continuous learning engine. Throughout, Martell emphasizes actionable steps, concrete examples, and a call‑to‑action to obtain his internal AI playbook via Instagram DM or video links.
Chapters
It's actually pretty simple to get ahead of 99% of people with AI because most people don't have the right AI skills. I spent the last six years inside the AI trenches. I'm talking building companies, developing internal tools and teaching these skills to millions. And I can tell you the top 1% use AI in a completely different way. So I'm going to show you the nine AI skills that you can use to get ahead of 99% of the people, even if you're starting at zero. And the last one is definitely my favorite. Starting with skill number one, prompt engineering. This is the skill of talking to the AI models and creating prompts that get the best output. Think of it this way. Garbage in, garbage out, and you definitely won't get the result. So every good prompt has four things. The first is it defines the role. You have to tell it to like, act like a marketer, act like a leadership expert, or act like a lawyer. Why? Because it's looking at all the knowledge in the world and it's saying this body of work is what I want you to pull from. So you give me the best answer through that role. Next, we have to give it the context. You have to give it all the information that you have about yourself. The more you tell it about your situation, the better the response because it'll use that to craft its search query in the brain called AI. Next, we have to give it a command. We have to give it very clear instructions on what you need. The more specific your command, your request, the more dialed in the results are going to be. And the last one is format. We want to tell it how to respond out. Do we want a PDF document? We want bullet points, we want to put it in a table, do we want as a spreadsheet? But I will tell you this, if you have an example of world class output that you've seen somebody else or you've created before, giving it that to pattern match against is actually a cheat code. Now that we've got your prompt dialed in, now we actually have to learn how to fight with AI to get it to do exactly what you want. Which brings us to skill number two, taste curation. The ultimate skill you can develop in this new world of AI is knowing what great looks, sounds and feels like. For example, if you're starting a new product and you need to come up with names for that product, AI can give you suggestions. It could write out 25, 50, 100 different names. But it takes taste to know when you look at those hundred which are the one or two that are actually going to work in the market. It reminds me of this quote by of all people, Ben Affleck, the actor, and he was talking about like, where AI is going to be challenged. He said, being a craftsman is knowing how to work, but art is knowing when to stop. That is taste, and that's your skill to develop. So here are the steps to improve your taste. But the last one is how you lock it in. First, we have to create your taste library. Where do you learn what great looks like? I love to use social media. I like to hear things that people say and write them down because I like the way it was said. If you're a startup and you want to like get better at pitching your startup, then you might go on YouTube and watch all the winners who ever pitched. If you're a musician, go watch all the best acts of all time. If you're a programmer, go review the code in GitHub from the best and most popular projects. The way to get better is to curate a taste library of examples of what world class looks like. Next, we have to develop your communication skills. Here's why your words, how you talk to the AI, or how you talk to other people will actually craft your world around you. So if you want the best prompts, you have to make sure you use the right words to describe exactly what you're looking for. So for example, when you're communicating to your AI, you have to be specific so you'll say things like, I need a max line length of a hundred characters. I do this all the time for Instagram notes. Or you might want to use the word leader, not boss. Those two different words will get different outputs in what you're trying to accomplish. Understanding the words that align with your tastes is the meta skill. People that are great at a topic because you've studied greatness or will talk about the work differently and the AI will actually respond and it'll shape the output to match that. And finally, as I mentioned, this is how we lock it all in. We have to learn how to implement universal rules. What this means is to continue to craft your prompts by giving it repeatable direction. So for example, you might always be saying, write in ninth grade English. I use this one very often. Or use similes over examples. Keep sentences short, avoid cheesy quotes, no EM dashes. That's the biggest one. I want to encourage you to start building the ability to write down your taste. When people hear taste, they think it's this like kind of sixth sense for what is great? You know, like, I can't tell you why, I just have a taste around it. It's like, no, you actually, if you document it and wrote down things, there's like specific outputs of what makes it something you like. And the more you learn to write them down, the better you're going to be able to get AI to do exactly what you want. And by the way, if you're struggling with any of this and really implementing AI in your business, I'm giving away my internal AI playbook on how to deploy AI in every department in your business. Just DM me AI business on Instagram, Dan Martell on Instagram or click the link below in the description. I'll send it over to you. Now, with your taste dialed in, it's time to make sure every response the AI gives you is fully personalized to you. Skill number three create a master prompt. If ChatGPT sounds like a stranger, it's because you've never properly introduced yourself to it. Here's why a master prompt is so valuable. You essentially have a document that's got a everything about you, your role, all the context. And when you go to prompt, you hit that little file icon and you upload that document. I do this for all the different roles in my life, even being a dad, if I'm doing like kid questions. So the answers are so freaking dialed. Everyone on my team has a master prompt. They have to. There's just no world where you're going to be good at AI if you don't have a master prompt to guide it. It's the reason why 92% of my teams work is supported through AI, because we've taught them to do what I'm about to share with you so that every output is hyper personalized. This is the first step to get your whole team way more efficient, way more productive using AI. Here's how we do that. And the last one is a little trick to ensure that you don't have to start from scratch as new platforms launch. First, just tell the AI act as an interviewer and ask me everything needed to build a master prompt for my role. And then it'll sit there and I'll write down all the questions that you need to answer so that it can create this document. Next, you have to answer those questions. Make sure you give it as much detail as you possibly can. Now, if you want a trick, I recommend use the voice to text feature, where it's like a little microphone icon and then you just click it and then you talk. Reading through all the questions and just allow yourself to ramble. The more you give it, the better it is because it's going to take everything you gave it and then insert it into the answers and it's going to do it really concise way so that we can produce this, this master prompt. And last, once you have all that say to it, generate a master prompt and save it as a PDF. This is the trick. See, saving that information as a PDF allows you to upload that PDF to every AI out there and even the ones that haven't even been built yet. So it future proofs you around other AIs that come out that are more powerful so that you can come into that platform from scratch and have it act as if you've been using it for years. This becomes your digital id no matter where you're at now. With that, the AI knows who you are, but context alone won't put you in the top 1%. You need to make sure your output is as polished as possible. Which brings us to our next skill output iteration. The challenge with most people is they don't fight enough with AI. They get an output and they're like, man, that's good enough. I guess I'm not that guy. I fight for it, I tweak it, I play with it is almost like there's a piece of clay and it can do anything. And I'm like pulling pieces of the clay away till I get the shape of the object that I want, which is the output. And I'm going back and forth with it until I get exactly how I want to look. For example, if you didn't see the Christmas commercial that Coca Cola use 70,000 AI prompts to generate. That's an example of fighting with AI and iterating to get it to do exactly what you want. And those 70,000 prompts were made by just five AI experts. So think how many times they prompted per expert to make it do exactly what they wanted. The top 1% iterate to perfection. And here's the truth. To be able to polish your outputs through this iterative process, you need to follow these three steps. And the last one nobody knows about, that I personally use almost every time I chat with AI. So the first thing we have to do, and we just talked about, is we have to upload our master prompt. It's going to give you all the context for your specific role to prime your prompting. The second is once it gives you an output, give it specific feedback. Don't say make it puncher. Anybody does that. Instead, say open with a strong reframe that talks about how X, Y and Z. Like, I want you to really ask yourself, what does it mean to be punchier? And finally, don't get stuck on the tiny details because things keep changing every time you prompt it. Because I use this feature that most people don't know about, called Canvas, to allow myself to lock it in and then I can tweak it manually. So, for example, if you're working on an email and every time you prompt it to rewrite the email, it kind of changes too much. You can ask it to write the email as a canvas. It'll create almost like a Google Doc within Chad GPT that you can click on to tweak words, sentences, create new paragraph breaks or whatever, and then say it. Use that format that you just created to write the next 10 emails. That one feature, Canvas, will change the game for how you iterate with AI. Okay, now that you've iterated to the perfect prompt, it's time to lock it in so you can repeat it over and over and over again. Which brings us skill number five, system prompts. A master prompt is a document that tells the AI who you are context. A system prompt is essentially instructions to tell the AI how to behave. This is what's mind blowing. AI is the first technology that is actually programmed not in computer code, but in words, which means anybody who can speak any language, which is the 4.9 billion people on the Internet right now are now AI programmers. And the way we program it is through the concept of a system prompt. It's just most people are never taught this. Now, this may sound a little scary, but trust me, it's way easier than you think. And I'm going to teach you the three steps to create one. And if you get to the third, you'll never have to think about it again. The first thing we have to do is we have to grab the final output that you just iterated against using AI and then write this prompt. Write the system prompt that would have generated this exact output. And what it does is it writes the actual system prompt. You might have never seen one before, but you'll see how detailed it is, how it breaks it up into structure. Then the next step is to save it as a PDF because now with a PDF document now you can use it in like, maybe use Claude or Gemini or Grok or any other platform, because the PDF is there with the instructions. The cool part is they all kind of talk similar and a system prompt from one AI will work for Another AI, now the last one and the most powerful. If you're using Chat GPT, for example, you can actually turn that code into a reusable component called a custom GPT by copying and pasting the output into the instructions of a custom GPT. It's more advanced, but the benefit is that I can then share the link to it with anybody on my team. So, for example, I created one called the Book Architect, which essentially takes a topic in a person's name, does a massive research project, and writes a book on behalf of all the content they've already put out in the world that I can read. I know, it's wild. So now that we've got like the master prompt figured out for a role and the system prompt for the instructions, you need to actually teach AI on how to push back on your ideas. And nobody does this. Which brings us to skill number six, using your AI as a critic. AI is designed not to fight with people. They made it almost like a people pleaser. The truth is, the pros, like myself, we use AI to expose our blind spots. I want it to give me my harsh reality. See, if it's just a yes man, then I'm just going to get a reflection of my thoughts that I already want. But if I get it to push against me, I'm going to get a better version of myself. For example, just last week, I used it to rebalance my investment portfolio. I gave it the goal of what I'm trying to accomplish, which it knew. And then I said, hey, here are some decisions I want to make. What do you think? And it pushed back. I didn't want to hear those things. There were some things I wanted to buy that I thought I should buy. There were some companies I want to invest in that I want to invest in. And guess what? It said, no, and here's why. And you said, and this is what's right. And I'm like, why are you so smart? So as long as you give it a direction and tell it to push on you, it's going to show you who you are. I mean, there's an incredible prompt you should try out. Tell me about the things that I need to know about my psychology that's been holding me back that I've never asked you. You're not going to like the response. But guess what? It's going to shine a light on a path that you might need to go down. Here's how we use AI to critique our thinking. And the last one is actually how to reintegrate it. So that it's always there. So the first thing is we want to ask AI to act like a devil's advocate and put that in the role section of your prompt. And then it'll stress test all of your assumptions and it'll list all your risks. But you have to tell it to do that. Next we have to ask it to break down all the criticism they gave you through the lens of first principles, which is a physics concept. The cool part about this is it's going to decompose everything it told you down to the fundamentals, and I'll help you rebuild the answer through base truth. So not only will it be very critical and give you the feedback that you might not want to hear, but it's going to teach you how to think about its answers, which is so freaking valuable. And lastly, if you agree with its assumption, here's the cool part. Capture the insight and update your master prompt. Give the master prompt back to the AI and then give it the insight and tell it, update this context as my role so that your answers always follow this principle. So now that you've got AI fighting with you and you get to like real core answers, the problem is that now you might have too much, okay? And then AI gets confused. So that's why you need the next skill, context compression. I know you may not know this and you're probably not going to believe me, but it's possible for you to give AI too much, too much information, too much context. What happens when you give it too much context? It actually spits back. I don't know what to do with all this. The AI can process a lot of information you give it. It just can't process everything. For example, the other day I was working on tweaking my Dan AI system and essentially I had 2 million words of context I want it to learn against. AI can deal with 2 million words. So I had to do a pre compression process to essentially compress the context, say that 15,000 times fast into 200,000 words using AI. What it did is it took that and it compressed it into very detailed and specific context that I can then use to actually train my AI. So if you have a lot of information, you're going to need to know how to do this so that you can get AI to consume it all. Here's how we do it. First thing is we have to just paste the mess, Give it everything. I'm talking transcription, data, all the context and then say this, say summarize this transcript with bullets for key facts, data and Stories, reduce it down to 10% of his original size. See how specific that is. The seconds we have to ask it what's missing from the original information and list it out and give me the option to bring it back because it might have actually summarize out some of the context that you need in there for the prompt to work. And lastly, lock it in. Use the compressed knowledge as the only context in the next prompt, meaning you use that information and start a new window and prompt with that compressed context. So essentially you take a big mess. You tell AI to pre process it into only the important stuff for the context. Then you say, what did you take out just in case I wanted back? And then you got the final verdict that is the input to the new prompting. You see, it's not as complicated it sounds. So now that you have your compressed knowledge, it's time to make sure your AI workspace isn't an absolute mess. Which brings us skill number eight, knowledge based gardening. Just like a garden, your AI knowledge base is going to need some weeding once in a while. When ChatGPT came out, my whole team jumped on it all. Buying their own accounts, running prompts, training their AIs. But everything was a freaking mess. Nobody was consistent, everybody was using different data to train it. So I had to sit down and I taught everyone how to use the concept of code projects to keep everything clean. Like a well curated garden. I learned a long time ago with AI, a messy mind creates messy prompts and worse outputs. So here's three things that you can do to organize once and reuse forever. First, we have to create a project folder for each initiative. So essentially think about a project, an outcome, just name it correctly. So for me, I have it for all my key projects. I even have a folder for all my investments so that I can put all the context and in those project folders, and I'm always making sure that the name is very clear. If you're in a team, use a team account. Next, we have to upload our master prompt into that project so it has the context on your role and the compressed context also to the project. So that compressed context might have came from a PDF that you saved it in so that you have your master prompt, you have the compressed context, you have anything else you want to give it that needs to fit within that project. And lastly, keep your best system prompts in an organized folder by department in a PDF form so that you can reuse it again. You want to future proof yourself around switching different AIs, because I guarantee the one you're using today may not be the one that wins in the Future. Keeping those PDFs updated and in folders by departments is going to make this process easy. Now this last skill has been easily the biggest game changer for me, and it'll allow you to easily get ahead of 99% of people if you do it right. Skill number 9 Personalized learning AI is the future of education, but 99% of people don't use it that way One of the things that I do almost daily is to ask Chad GPT to create a research paper in a story format on any topic as deep and nerdy as I want to get, and then I can just listen to it when I'm at the gym. Here's how we do it. First, write a simple prompt and tell it how much time you have to learn just anything. Say Teach me AI. I've got seven minutes. Next we want to ask it to put it in a simple conversational language. I like to use grade levels depending on the topic because if it's I mean I go to fifth grade level because I get a bunch of metaphors that really don't give me details. But you can say like seventh grade language if you prefer. So for example, write a 10 minute research paper on the history of AI for a seventh grader. So then lastly, just click that play icon and you put your AirPods on and you can just listen to the answer while you're walking around or doing stuff or going to the gym. This is a thing. Chad GPT isn't a chatbot. That's actually just a use case of AI. It's more than that. It's a creative operating system. Stop using it for simple tasks. Use it to co create the world ahead of you. Use it to help you with your goals and where you can't see your blind spots and conversations with people that you should be having that you've been putting off, or text messages that you're afraid to reply to because you don't know what to say. Just ask it. If you stop playing in beginner mode and start using AI the right way, it will make you an expert in life because 99% of people are just not using AI this way. And if you do you will easily find yourself in the top 1%. And remember, if you want my internal prompts, just DM me AI business on Instagram or click the link below and I'll send it over to you. Now click the video if you want to learn the 15 AI tools that you need to build a million dollar business.
