Ahoy, Digital Writers!
Today I’m going to walk you through a 4-step process to turn ChatGPT into your “personal idea machine.”
For anyone who has taken Ship 30 for 30, you’re familiar with the concept of The Endless Idea Generator.
This is our simple system to generate 100+ ideas to write about in 30 minutes or less—even if you think have nothing to say.
But with the help of our digital writing intern ChatGPT, we need to update this description.
Because now, instead of taking 30 minutes to generate these ideas ourselves, we’re going to train ChatGPT to do it for us instantly.
Here’s how:
Just kidding.
We are once again here to remind you that prompts like this generate output on par with a middle schooler.
But this is Write With AI—and that means we craft thoughtful, instructional prompts to generate *useful* output.
And to create our Endless Idea File prompt, we’re going to follow the 4 steps laid out in a 70-line Megaprompt.
And the best part?
We’ve written the prompt in a way that takes 100% of the “doing” off your plate.
All you need is one single topic idea (in just 5 words or less). ChatGPT takes care of the rest.
Let’s dive in.
One quick heads up: This is a “multi-step” prompt that instructs ChatGPT to complete a series of steps, based on your input. So although the prompt is one long block, we are going to walk through it in “steps” so you understand each part (and how we came up with it).
From a high level:
We train ChatGPT on the concept of Topics, Subtopics, and Proven Approaches
We instruct it to complete a chained series of steps that starts with topic generation and ends with proven approach “questions”
You give ChatGPT your topic and it generates the subtopics & proven approaches for you, instantly.
You then copy and paste those questions into a document and answer them, creating the foundation for *years* of future content
So in today’s edition, we’re going to walk through 2 separate processes
The construction of the prompt itself (so you can see the “thinking” behind it that you can then apply to your future prompts
The best way to use the prompt (to 10x your content output)
Now, here’s the entire prompt (warning: it’s long, but we are going to walk through it step by step)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Write With AI to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.