On the quickness of life and AI
Happy Friday!
Here are 3 ideas, a note on Infinite Jest, and an AI Mega Prompt you can use today.
3 Ideas from this Week
I.
There are 8 billion people in the world.
You just need 4 of them to pay you $2,500/m to make $120,000/yr, or 8 of them to make $240,000/yr.
Don't overthink it.
II.
I always take my birthday off to reflect and look back. I think it’s a great day to do this. Sadly, only one company I’ve ever worked for actually had a policy to demand people take their birthdays off.
2 years ago I was dreaming of owning a Tesla and buying a home with a bit of land. Now I own both of those things and have even started my own business on top of that.
Things happen fast in life. Write down what you want and break it into small actionable steps and make it happen.
III.
We underestimate what we can do in a day and overestimate what we can do in a year.
The average lifespan is only 4000 weeks long. This is absurdly short.
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is just over 31 years. It is crazy to think I only have about 2 billion seconds left to live. Unfortunately, that clock never stops.
Infinite Jest
My friend and I started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace together. It’s over 1000 pages long and contains nearly 400 footnotes (some of those containing their own footnotes). It’s a book that requires multiple bookmarks and features a vast world of characters centered around a tennis academy and a drug addict’s house.
The book came out in 1996 and it’s wild to see some of Wallace’s predictions on tech and entertainment. How it consumes our lives so much that it paralyzes us to do little else. Video calls, on-demand entertainment at the click of a button, and films in the mail are featured in the book. Netflix didn’t even launch until late 1997 and Wallace wrote this book from ‘93-’96. What’s more, is the connection between entertainment and drug addiction.
The similarities around each requiring a fix and the need to consume share a powerful lesson for today’s culture.
On AI
I’d love to leave you with someone actionable you can use today. If you don’t know already I worked for an AI-powered video company back in 2016-2019 (https://openai.com/customer-stories/waymark) so I’m super interested in what’s happening right now.
Most people are not good at creating scripts for ChatGPT so I’d like to introduce you to the Mega Prompts. These are large prompts for ChatGPT that act like project briefs and contain goals, limitations, audience, etc. Here’s a Mega Prompt I used recently that you can try. Take this and tweak it for any type of project you may be working on.
You are a professional email marketing expert.
I want you to help me write a 7-day email welcome sequence for people signing up for the trial of my product.
---
Product Name: [name of your product]
Product Description: [what it does and the problem it helps solve]
Audience: [your main niche target market]
Goals:
1. Help them get as much use from the [product] as possible, so they understand how it can help them.
2. Show them how paying for the product after the trial is favourable for them.
Guidelines:
1. I do not want you to talk about the [product] in all the emails. Only in the first and last. The content in the emails should NOT focus on the [product] but the problem it help them solve.
2. Use "you" and "yours" much more than "we" and "ours" in the copywriting.
3. Focus on showing the readers how they can solve their problems with case studies, how-tos and actionable tactics.
Newsletter Content Outline (this is for your knowledge only):
Day 1: Short introduction to the product. Include a "what to expect during the next 7 days", including a list of the most interesting topics.
Days 2-5: Do not mention the [product]. These emails should contain valuable, actionable content. The problem the content solves should be connected to the problem the [product] solves - but without having to use the product to solve it.
Day 6: Continue sharing actionable content. Introduce the paid plan without being pushy or selling too hard (do not include it in the subject line).
Day 7: Explain how the [Product will help them reach their specific goals faster/better]
IMPORTANT: You are NOT allowed to talk about the [product] in emails 2-6. Emails 2-6 shall be at least 300 words long.
For each email, include:
- Subject line
- A short, blog-post style text, helping the [audience] solve one common and specific problem they have, related to the [product]
- "In tomorrow's email": What to expect in the next email
- A call-to-action
Limitations:
Do not link to blog posts outside the newsletter.
Include the value in the actual newsletter copy.
Make it actionable.That’s all for this week. See you next Friday!