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

Most people use AI like a fancy Google search. That's like hiring a private chef and the only thing you ask them to make you is a peanut butter sandwich. I build AI products every single day through my company, Martell Ventures, and I use AI in everything I do. So today I'm gonna be answering the most common questions that people have about AI, everything from productivity to growing your business to building your own software. For every single one, I'll walk you through the exact thing I would do to solve it step by step, and I'll tell you the exact tool I use and why. By the end, You'll be moving so much faster, it's gonna feel like you turn the cheat codes on. Let's start with the first one. All right, what do we got here? How do I give AI all the context I need without having to type so freaking much? I love this one. Here's the principle. I talk 3 times faster than I type. That's why when I'm using any AI from a chat tool to a coding platform to an AI agent, I am talking and using some kind of tool to transcribe what I'm saying into text that the AI can understand. The tool I like to use is called WhisperFlow because it integrates in my phone on the keyboard and it also integrates onto my laptop and it collects all this context that I even feed to my AI brain so it gets smarter. The other thing I do is I flip the script where I ask the AI to ask me questions so the AI will pull from me so that I don't have to guess what it needs to do its job. It's as easy as telling it, ask me questions if you need more context at the end of every prompt. For the AI tool, I use Claude because it has a built-in feature called the Ask User tool. It'll like break down your question or its context it needs into like 2 or 3 steps and it'll just say, are you asking for this or this? It does multiple choice, checklists, priority lists, even other where you can type a better answer that it didn't even give you as an option. Onto the next one. Why does AI keep giving me such generic answers? Mm. I got to explain how AI works. It's essentially trained on everything that's ever been created or ever said or ever captured in the history of mankind. So by default, when it gives you an answer, it's essentially condensing and averaging out the best answer based on everything. That's why most answers from AI is very generic. It just doesn't feel nuanced. So what we want to do is when we ask it a question, we want to get very specific in our prompt. So I've broken this down into a framework called MAPS. We start with M, which is the mission. What is the goal of this prompt? What do you want it to accomplish? It's the thing behind the task. Like, I need you to help me get more customers. Then you have the A, which is ask. You want to then ask it for specifically what you need. So I need you to generate me a list of leads that I can call on to get more customers. I need you to build a landing page so that I can capture emails. That's usually the only thing people give the prompt and they're missing the other parts of it. And that's why the answers look very generic. Then we go to P, which is the parameters. This is everything you have in information about your situation that you can give it. If you have past clients, give it the information on those past clients. If you have existing scripts that you've used and these things have worked, give it to it. Did you know you can give it like 2 to 3 full books of information for it to use to give you a very specific answer. And most people are giving it a paragraph or 2 at most. And if you don't have a bunch of documents preset or the data, this is where you can use your voice tool to actually just talk to it like crazy to give it as much context as you have. Then it's the S, which stands for shape, but essentially it's the format, the shape of the output. So do you want it as a spreadsheet? You want it as a bulleted list? You want it short and concise. Now for tools, there's no specific tool here because this applies to literally every AI. But one of the tips I'll give you, 'cause I use this quite often, is using a tool called Perplexity where you can actually ask it to answer your questions using different models so you can compare them side by side. It's kind of like having a council of AI models where you ask it the same question to see how they all reply to get you the best answer. So once you give it the MAPS, those 4 key components, To the prompt, then the output's going to be very specific. Next up, boom, boom. How do I stop having to explain who I am in every new chat? Oh my gosh! Have you ever noticed this when you're talking to AI? It feels like you talk to a stranger every time. How do we stop that? Every new chat technically starts with zero information. Like it doesn't really have a lot of information on your business or your goals or the projects you're working on. What I want to share with you is my philosophy, which is I take. 5 minutes to set this up. What I'm about to teach you, and this changes my responses to perfect answers like I'm talking to a professional consultant that knows everything about me. I used to teach this thing called the master prompt, which you'd sit there and you'd have to answer all these questions. Now we don't even have to do that anymore. All we do is we give it access to existing tools where the information about you exists. Your email probably has a lot of stuff. Your Google Drive has a whole lot of information. Maybe use Notion, maybe Slack. All of these tools have rich amount of information about who you are, what projects you're working on, who's in your life. Once you have 'em connected, then you tell it, build the most detailed master prompt of who I am from all this information. And if you have any questions, ask me. Then the next step is it'll build 90% of everything. It may get some information a little wrong 'cause sometimes the AI likes to hallucinate. We just make some edits. And we hit save. Now that we've got this document, right, and it could just be in the chat or you can save it as a PDF or a Google Drive. Now we want to take it and we want to save it to your settings so that the AI now has all that information on you every time you start a new chat and every other AI tool you use, you can copy and paste the same master prompt into that tool so it has that same context. So the tool I like to use to connect everything is Claude. 2 reasons I use Claude versus all these other AIs. Is one, it has as of today the best memory system, meaning the more I give it, the more it remembers and the better it can use that in its replies. Second reason is it's built by a company called Anthropic. And when I looked at all the different other AIs and I'm asking myself, who do I trust the most? I trust Anthropic over some of the other ones because some of them are free, but it's not free because you're paying with your data. Especially if I'm giving it financial information and internal documents, I need to trust Next question. You can't pull it away from me too quick. All right, how can I use AI to learn things faster? Ooh, that's a good question. This is one of my favorite questions 'cause I would say that's probably the number one use case I use AI for every day. If I buy a course and I gotta follow it in order, it might take me weeks. A book could take me days. For me, it takes me weeks. Even then, I'm not really learning the topics to the problems I have. With AI, I can learn any topic at the fastest speed, like 20 times faster, usually in under 30 minutes. These are the specific prompts that I use to learn faster. First off, I tell AI to go find the best resources on this topic, and I'll use AI to search YouTube videos, find the books, find the courses, find the resources, find the events. Now the key is you tell it only recent stuff, 'cause there's no point in me going to learn about AI from somebody 5 years ago That is not relevant today. Second thing is I'll tell it, now build me a learning plan from these and teach them to me. Sometimes I don't need to read the whole book or go through a whole course to learn one specific thing. So AI lets me skip to the most relevant parts. I actually made a whole video about this around self-educating with AI, and I'll link it up at the end so that you can just dive in there if you really want to take this on turbo drive. Now, here are the tools that I love, and this is as of today. They may change in the future, but on a daily basis, I'm using a tool called NotebookLM. It's made by Google. It's absolutely free. What is special about it is that you can actually search a topic you want to learn. It'll find the best resources because Google has 3 times as much access to information, to PDFs, to websites, to YouTube, the number one teacher in the world. And then it'll create a special AI where I can chat with it about the topic and then even special formats and outputs, things like a podcast where I can listen to it. I can even call in and ask questions to this AI voice. It'll create presentations. It'll even create a video overview of the topic that I just searched for. And even if you want to test yourself on a topic like AI, it'll make a quiz like flashcards and stuff so you can see how well you actually know a topic. I'm not making this stuff up. Try it out for yourself. NotebookLM, it's crazy. And that's how I use AI to learn. Let's go to the next one. Question: I want to use AI to help me create I want to set 5-year goals, but I don't know where to start. Hmm, this is a good one. We can't hit a target we can't see. Most people have goals that are very vague. I want to make more money. I want to get healthier. I want to grow a family. All these things lack specificity. AI is really good at taking things that are very vague and turning them to very tactical outputs that you can actually learn from. Here's how I do it. First off, I ask it to help me define 5-year goals. And to be very specific, what are called SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. So you can even use that acronym when you're asking it, and it'll give you the output that maps to that. Second, answer its questions out loud using any tool that can record your voice because it's a lot faster than typing. So I use WhisperFlow. Then next, we need to make it visual because our brains think in pictures, not words. So here's the prompt to do that. Ask it to describe your life In the way it looks when you hit that goal. Tell it, tell me about the sights, the sounds, the details, the feelings, and then turn that into a hyper-realistic image, also known as a vision board. Here's a pro tip. Ask it to take that image and redo it into a 9 by 16 aspect ratio, essentially a vertical image, 'cause that's the size of the wallpaper on your phone. And then you're looking at your goals 5 years from now, 100 times a day. I personally have always had a vision board for my goals and I always update it and I'm using AI more and more to help me make it crystal clear what it looks like. Now, the best tools for this, I've been using ChatGPT Image 2. That's new as of right now. That's my favorite one because it's also free if you use ChatGPT. You can also use Nano Banana from Google. That's used inside the Gemini AI platform, so you can use that. But those 2 as of today are the best for creating images based on the prompts I just gave you. All right, next one. How can I use AI to help me stick to my goals? I believe that willpower breaks, systems don't. What we need to do is ask ourselves, what are the systems we can put in our place to make our goals inevitable? And one of the big ideas is that we need to see the progress so that we can feel the momentum, so we can get excited about the potential of hitting our goals. This is where AI can really give you an advantage if you know how to use it. First thing we have to do is we have to give the AI our goals. Once it knows what we want to achieve, step 2 is to have it build a written plan. Ask it to break it down into the specific timelines that you would need to follow and the things you'd have to do to achieve those goals. Then we're gonna do something a little geeky where we're gonna ask the AI to create us a daily dashboard of here's the goal, I wanna weigh this or I wanna make this much money. It'll give us the activities, the tasks we have to do on a daily basis. And we're gonna enter in the number of the things we have to do on a daily basis that would high probability lead to that outcome. And if you wanna make it visual, you could set whatever the goal is. It'll calculate where you're at based on how much time's left. And I like to do, if I'm below 10%, I'm red, I'm not on track. If I'm within 10% of the activity it needs to see me do, I'm yellow. And if I'm on track, it's green. If you want a pro tip, we can ask it to turn it into a mobile app on your phone. Now this is advanced. You're gonna have to learn how to build it, but you can tell it to do that and it can either build a webpage you save to your phone and you can ask it how to install that, or you can actually build a real mobile app. So the specific AI tools that I use today, I like to use Codex. Codex is something I still have a login for. It's built by ChatGPT. It's really good at coding. It's really good at visuals. It's really good at like math. And this kind of like break things down into activities is really good for it. If the information's ugly and confusing, Nobody's gonna do it every day, but if you make it pretty and gamified and make it really visually appealing, you'll be in there every day. Next up, can AI plan my calendar around my goals? Ooh wee, that's a good one. I don't believe our goals are things that we want. Our goals are the byproduct of where we spend our time, and a great way to track what I honestly do with my time is to use my calendar. That's why for me. Everything in my life is in my calendar because then I can use it to audit what I've been up to. So if my goals don't materialize, then I can ask myself what needs to change in my calendar to make sure the goals happen. Most founders probably have about 10 hours a week in their calendar for things that they really don't need to be doing, that they need to move around so that they can move their life forward. Here's my recommendation. First off, connect your calendar to your AI. It is so cool to watch it analyze everything you've been up to. Second, give it your goals for this quarter. Then we have to tell it, using my goals, look at my calendar like you're a ruthless mentor. Don't worry to hurt my feelings. And also argue with me where I need to restructure my time and tell me why, but what's best for my goals, not what I want right now. Now the key is it does need the data in your calendar and it needs to know what your goals are. So those are things you might have to get before you can run this prompt. And pro tip, I wrote a whole book on this, a Wall Street Journal bestselling book called Buy Back Your Time. Just have it study that book and do what I teach in the book 'cause there's some other things that I can't go over that you'll want to use and it knows, so just ask it. These are the AI tools that I use to make this happen. I'm a big fan of Claude because of the connector tool. So I ask it to connect to my calendar. It also has a really good memory system so it knows my goals 'cause I've already given it to it through my master prompt strategy. And it doesn't just look at my schedule, it tells me what's wrong with it. And that's what I love the most about it is it'll say like, hey, you're spending a lot of time here, but you have this goal and you have this person on your team. Maybe you should ask them to take over this meeting so that you can go and add this to make sure that this is getting done. And look, if you're a business owner and you're like, how do I get my team to learn this? I actually put together a full playbook on how I integrate AI into every department within my company. And if you go to Instagram and follow me and then DM me the word AI business, I'll send it over to you for free. Onto the next one. Pow! How do I get AI to write emails that actually sound like me? Hmm. When you're using AI for your emails, they know, you know, and it's these em dashes and all this stuff. Look, we're going to fix that right now. First thing you have to do is connect your email, maybe Gmail or Outlook, to your AI tool. Second, ask it to go through your emails, analyze it, and write a document to teach other AIs to write emails just like you. You might write completely different to your boss than you do to your friends. It can actually understand the difference, then have it create this document, right? Essentially a tone document or a skill. It'll know how to create this guide and write it for you. Now here's how we do it. I use Claude AI because the latest model is really good. And then because I use it for connecting my Gmail, I just have it go through my Gmail and update that document Every time I need it. And like I said before, my email has a lot of sensitive data, so I'd rather use Anthropic, who built Claude, than other AI tools. And also Claude, for the longest time, has been the best copywriter out there. All right, next one. What do we got? How do I get AI to do my repetitive tasks automatically without me having it to ask me every day and tell me how sexy I am? Hmm, what an interesting question. I got you. The repetitive task is actually where AI shines. So here's my rule. The moment you catch yourself doing something twice, stop. It's called DRY. Don't repeat yourself. It's a programming thing. My background is software. It's what I do. If you've done it twice, you can set up with automation and then you'll never have to do it ever again. Here's what we need to do. We gotta take the thing that we do repeatedly. Like if it's a one-off and you gotta do it like once, who cares? But if you're doing it every week, every day, huge opportunity for using AI. Second, I like to record myself doing the thing and talking out loud while I'm doing it. Third, do it once, narrate it as you. Fourth, then ask the AI to turn that recording into a skill. This is an AI-specific thing. It's called an AI skill. And now you set it up to do it on a schedule. Now, tools within ChatGPT Work. It's got this new feature called Record and Replay. Just click the plus icon and just tell it, I'm going to record this thing and my goal is to automate this. And then it'll take your screen over. It'll start recording everything you do, and then it'll create a skill. See, other tools are cool. I use Claude and many of the other ones, but they take over your whole screen while it's doing the task. You got to sit there and wait for your computer to finish and you're stuck watching all the work. With ChatGPT, they built this to capture and then do it behind the scenes and save it as a skill so you can set it and forget it. All right, next one. Boom. How do I organize all my notes and ideas when they're all over the place? Ooh, that's a good one. In the past, if I had this mess, I would have to start sitting there and try to figure out like how to grab stuff from a Google Drive, I'm migrating over to Notion, or maybe I have things in Vimeo like videos that I've created, but I wanna move 'em over to Dropbox. And that would've taken a lot of time. Now with AI, we can get it to do it automagically. So here's the tools and the steps that I use to make it really easy. First off, we gotta pick one place where we wanna put all this disorganized stuff. Into. For a lot of people, they'll call this like a home database or home structure that becomes the brain behind all these other systems where the AI can now learn from. Second thing is, is now when I use the other AI tools, I point to that one place. And the third, and this is a pro move, if you have an AI agent and I use Apex.host, or you can use Hermes or OpenCLAW, all these different agent platforms, you can ask it not only to add stuff to it, but to organize it and clean it up. Every night I have processes that run, my agent runs to delete files that don't need to happen, to connect things that should be connected, to save things in places so that they're available to other agents. For the tools for saving all this information in different places, the one I use for my personal is Obsidian. The other one to use is Notion. So my team uses Notion for all of our corporate stuff, but then I take that plus everything else and I save it into Obsidian. Obsidian sits on my agent machine where he has access to my decisions, to my knowledge, to my relationships, podcast interviews, my conversations with my team, my strategic documents. Everything is there. That way when I talk to it, my AI, it can give me very specific answers. If you're a little bit more nerdy, I'd recommend Obsidian. But if you're just starting off, you can go use Notion. It's really easy to get going. Bam! How do I use AI to keep track of my business finances? Financials is tricky. Why? Information isn't structured properly. Most accounting software doesn't really have a strong AI tool. Most entrepreneurs don't like to track everything and give it to the AI or give it to the tool in general. So garbage in, garbage out. But I found some really simple tools and a very simple structure to help you use AI with your financials. And the truth is, if you do this right, you should be able to ask it anything about your money, personal and professional, and get an answer on the spot. The first thing is you need to have an AI tool where you can connect all your financials. I'm talking your bank statements, payment systems, all of the stuff that you use for your financials should connect to the AI tool. Then once I have it all connected, then I can ask it questions. Do I have enough cash to make this hire? Or what is my current burn rate? Or how many months of inventory do I have? Because it should have access to all of that. Third, I wanna see things in a graph format, spreadsheets, visuals of how things are going in my business. AI has the power to do that. So now the tools I use, and you can build this on your own and it might take you months. It's a lot easier to use something somebody else built. I like to use a tool called hellofrank.ai. Full transparency, this is one of my venture companies, but we built it internally and then brought it publicly. Because all my friends that saw how we use the AI wanted access to it. It'll essentially act like a full-time CFO that I don't have to spend $10,000, $15,000 a month on. Completely secure, completely safe. It's certified and it connects straight to your bank accounts. My favorite feature is the daily cash email. Essentially, it takes all the businesses I'm involved in, pulls the cash position of everyone, and it tells me how the money is moving within those companies and what I should focus on. In business, speed is the thing. I want to be able to ask it questions and have it answer in seconds. So that's the tool I use. If you want to try it, the link is in the description. All right, next one. I save a ton of AI tutorials on Instagram but never implement them. What should I do? Oh, are you plagued with shelf help where you just collect things someday maybe you would learn them? I'm the same way. I like to save everything on TikTok, on Instagram. I have Reels saved everywhere thinking someday I'll get a chance to review it and I don't, but it feels really productive and honestly it's just organized procrastination. Here's how I use AI to solve this problem. First, next time you see one, just grab the link. Second, take that link, paste it into an AI and ask it, is this useful for me? It knows your goals, it knows what you're up to, it knows your calendar, it knows what systems you've built so far. Just ask it. If so, apply it wherever you see necessary. And the third thing, and this is a pro move, is you can automate this whole process based on like asking it if it's useful and if it is to implement it and just call it like Instagram ingestion. And then that skill within your AI tool will run that every time it sees an Instagram link or a TikTok link. So you don't have to re-explain yourself every time. Now, my favorite tool for doing this is my own platform called apex.host. It's my AI agent. And the reason why I use Apex, because I want my Apex system called Kai to know everything Going on in my life, so that's where I give it the links. Even though I might then go use a different system to implement, he's like my genius sidekick that knows everything about my life. Next one. What's the best AI assistant out there? Ooh, that's a good one. As the guy who wrote the book on training an assistant, buy back your time, the AI version is way funner. They don't sleep. They don't take vacations. They don't complain. You don't have to swap them out. So everybody wants to build this AI assistant these days. So I'm going to teach you exactly how to do that. First off, you have to get all of the APIs, all the different systems, and you got to connect them to your AI. Then we have to set up an AI harness, an agent to keep them all running so that it can monitor my calendar, monitor my email, look at what people are sending me on Slack and truly be an assistant. Then we have to create an identity. Essentially, our AI agent, our assistant needs an identity that tells it how it should behave, the rules it should use, security parameters so that we don't lose our information. Now, if this all sounds a little overwhelming for you, this is the exact reason why I built with my team 2 separate tools to get this out of the box for them without having to configure and manage all the security and the complexity of doing it themselves. The first one, if you're a CEO and you're leading a big team and your problem is clarity, you want visibility, you want information, you wanna understand how everything works and you want it to help you, what I call single-player mode, That's Apex.host. That is like my Kai, and my Kai knows everything. I might ask it about my marketing campaigns. I might ask it about my calendar, personal tasks, my goals, my projects. I might ask it to go investigate things. I even have it call team members to get updates on projects. It is an AI-powered chief of staff, an AI assistant, and it is wildly powerful. Now, if you need a power-up for your team, I call this multiplayer mode. That's where you wanna look into a tool like Precision. Precision is an AI-powered tool for your team that has full access to all the company data. It integrates it, it correlates it, it cleans it up. It creates what's called a source of truth on top of your data. It allows them to create dashboards, scoreboards, execute tasks integrated into Slack. It is powerful. Full transparency on both. These are my companies, but I use both every single day. Precision to run my companies. Apex for me. All right, next one. I get error messages all the time when writing code and have no idea what they mean. How do I fix them? The big idea is we have to show the problem to the AI. If the AI knows what the problem is, it can actually solve it. Here's what we do. First, we have to show the AI what the problem is. Sometimes you're writing an app and there's an error, but you don't know what it is. So sometimes I'll ask the code to create an error log that's visible when I'm developing so I can screenshot exactly what the error is. You can just say to your code, create an error window that I can screenshot to tell you what I'm seeing when it's broken. Second thing is we have to give it to the AI. So all you do is take a screenshot of the error message and you feed it back to the AI and say, fix it. The tools I like to use is on most computers, you can hit the key combo to take a screenshot and then I just drag that image in. For code lately, I've been using a lot of Cloud Code. And that's one I probably use most of the time. And look, I'm a bit of a geek, so sometimes if Claude isn't doing what I need it to do, I'll screenshot the whole project and then I'll go to Groq Build or Codex, which is ChatGPT's, and ask it to see if it can come up with better answers to fix problems. That way I've got 2 different AI models trying to fix each other to get the best outcome. So that was a lot. But if you're here, that means you're committed to learning. Tools will change. Trust me, you come back in 90 days, I might have a different list for you, but that is what I'm using today. But the truth is, the principles will never change. Most people just watch and do nothing with it. I guarantee you're here because you actually want to get better at it. So all I'm going to ask you is to pick one of these tools that I mentioned, one of these paths to improve your life using AI, and implement it today. And to get a level of commitment from you, I need you to write a comment and let me know what are you going to use AI to solve for you today? And if you're a business owner and you want my full playbook on how to put AI into every every corner of your business, just go find me on Instagram, follow, and send me the words AI business, and I'll send it right over. Now, remember that video I was talking about that mentioned how to learn anything even faster with AI? Well, it's right here, so just click it and I'll see you on the other side.