081 • AI tools as vehicles for personal development
Using AI more intimately, including prompts and journalling...
When I start thinking about AI, professional uses are largely what come to mind—wrangling data for my university work, catching grammar errors in longer pieces of writing, and providing instructions to change detailed configurations in business backend tools.
But as the power, especially the memory, of these tools improves, I’m becoming more interested in making them useful for self-improvement.
There’s not much in this context that I’m using AI for consistently right now, but there are a couple of places in which it’s helped, and I wanted to go over them here…
ChatGPT memory and prompting
OpenAI’s ChatGPT introduced a ‘memory’ feature quite recently. The idea behind this setting, if you have it activated, is to ‘remember’ relevant details from your conversations and use them to inform or give examples in further interactions.
Scrolling through the internet, I’ve started to come across a few prompts geared towards using this feature for introspection. One of the simplest that I used was the following:
“If you were the devil, how would you weaken a man like me?”
Now this might seem extreme, but from what I can tell it’s required to shake ChatGPT out of its canned answers a little. Most of what it responded to me was a little sensitive to share on the newsletter but I can give you a snippet…
…6. Comparison and Impatience: The comparison trap, especially in a space full of other entrepreneurs and writers, could erode confidence. Impatience to see results or measuring against others’ success could lead to unnecessary changes in strategy or loss of authenticity.
7. Compromising Values: Tempting you to make decisions that aren’t aligned with your principles, whether in business practices or the stories you tell, could lead to internal conflict that eats away at your passion and authenticity…
And it’s completely right, even given the very limited scope of my life experiences that ever gets fed into the system. Straight after this, I asked what it thought in terms of solutions…
Me…
“If you were the saviour, what would you do to stop that?”
ChatGPT…
…5. Encouraging Imperfect Action: I’d instill the mindset that taking imperfect action is more valuable than stagnating in pursuit of perfection. I’d remind you that your work, as it is right now, has value and can inspire or benefit others. You can refine over time without the pressure of being flawless from the start.
6. Fostering Gratitude and Mindfulness: Practicing gratitude helps maintain focus on what’s going well, shifting your mindset away from comparison and dissatisfaction. Mindfulness would ground you in the present, reducing anxiety about the future and enabling clearer decision-making…
Again right, even if basic. And who am I to ignore the Fundamentals? More often than not it’s these things that we need to continually reinforce, rather than coming up with an ingenious solution to a novel problem.
So I found this very useful indeed. But ChatGPT missed a few important points that took place in my life, seeing as I’d never mentioned them in our chats, so this method wasn’t completely satisfactory. But I came across an alternative more recently, which motivated writing this newsletter issue…
AI and journalling
There’s a new breed of tool coming into the self-improvement world too. You’ve heard of Day One, but what about Rosebud?
The latter is software that I came across after reading a short tweet that went over somebody’s best AI-tool-finds of 2024. I’m not affiliated with this software, and don’t actively use it (a decision that I’ll explain in due time), but I think it’s a fantastic concept and the execution is also very good, so I thought I’d mention it here.
If you choose to use Rosebud, you’ll find it not dissimilar to a normal journalling app. You open up a box to empty your current thoughts, intentions or daily review into. The differences begin when you hit ENTER. Instead of just entering the information into the database and storing it, Rosebud returns with some prompts to help you work deeper into what you’re experiencing. Once you think you’ve answered enough, you then save the entry.
Based on what you type in over days and weeks, the software starts coming up with themes. It stores the people you mention, activities and emotions that you encounter in your entries. As well as this, there’s a chat box that allows you to query across all your notes, getting more accurate and specific answers than what I mentioned earlier from ChatGPT.
Very useful indeed. But there is quite a significant monthly subscription that I’m not willing to pay for right now. I’ve got another solution anyway…
Since 2022, I’ve had the foresight to sporadically capture daily notes in Obsidian of what I’m doing day-to-day, however mundane. And now there are tools such as Google NotebookLM, in which you can upload many files and can ask questions of them, so I’ve just been uploading my daily notes into this tool and asking similar questions to that I did of ChatGPT earlier.
Now most of my journaling in this time has happened on paper, in my Traveler’s notebooks so this strategy isn’t perfect either, but there’s already some data to draw on, unlike inside of Rosebud, where I would have had to start again, and it’s more comprehensive than asking ChatGPT what it knows of me from.
I won’t say doing this is life-changing, but sometimes the AI brings up some interesting points. And more often than not, it reinforces the things we all know already, so it’s a useful reminder to focus on the Fundamentals when considering things at scale.
It was a longer issue today, but I felt compelled to make it. Let me know how well it works if you give it a go.
I hope that everyone’s had a good start to 2025,
— Theo
Last week’s issue (extended cut)…
What I created this week…
I eventually got around to making a proper video from all the clips I shot on this day. Back in October I actually wrote an issue about this experience too, which you can read here…
