Decode what makes someone you admire so good.
Go past “they’re brilliant.” Find the particular things an admired person does—and which of those you could make your own.
Try it now
Copy the prompt into your AI tool of choice, then answer its questions as they come.
Paste it into any AI chat to start. For most people, this is all you need.
Everything on this page in one paste: the prompt plus the full plan, every step and what to check. Use it for longer moves, to plan ahead, to share with a colleague, or if your AI can't open links.
How it goes
What the AI will do
- Investigate concrete examples of the qualities you admire, using correspondence for someone you know or original work and credible accounts for a public or fictional figure.
- Compare those practices with your own work and life, then develop useful adaptations and a small exercise.
What to have ready
- The person and what you admire about them; rough examples or scenes are welcome, along with any part of your work or life where you would like to learn from them.
Where you come in
- Describe what draws you to the person, clarify your own situation when needed, and choose a practice to try.
What you'll get
You have an evidence-grounded account of the person’s distinctive practices, practical applications to your work and life, and one exercise tailored to your situation.
You're done when
You have an evidence-grounded account of the person’s distinctive practices, practical applications to your work and life, and one exercise tailored to your situation.
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result. ### Start with the activity and the user's context Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear. Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them. ### Check the capabilities needed for this work Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit. When useful access is missing: - Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help. - Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot. - If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response. - Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available. ### Ask focused questions and respect the answers Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful. Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements. ### Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material. Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work: - Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role. - Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations. - Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately. ### Produce, check, and revise the result Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them. Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result. Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized. Help me decode what makes someone I admire so good and find what I can use in my own work and life. Start with the person and the qualities that matter to me, investigate actual examples, and turn the findings into practices suited to my circumstances. ### 1. Begin with who and what I admire First ask who the person is and what I admire about them. Wait for my answer before researching or choosing an interpretation. If I already supplied both, acknowledge those specifics and build on them without asking again. Welcome a rough description, a memorable encounter, a piece of work, or a fictional scene. Establish the exact person or character if the name is ambiguous. Identify the qualities I am drawn to: perhaps how they notice, decide, explain, create, listen, handle conflict, or live. Treat those as starting hypotheses, not established explanations of their excellence. Determine whether I communicate with the person, know them through their public work, or mean a fictional character; that determines the evidence route. ### 2. Find concrete evidence of their practice For someone I communicate with, try relevant available access and search our emails, chats and other messages, calendar interactions, meeting transcripts, shared documents, project outputs, and related company records. Use their name and the qualities or incidents I mentioned. Look for actual choices, phrasing, sequences of action, responses from others, and results. Search enough contrasting situations to see whether an apparent practice recurs. A calendar entry establishes an encounter, not what happened in it. For a famous person, writer, or someone known through public work, investigate broadly across their actual work, original texts, speeches or performances, interviews, and credible accounts. Verify sources you can inspect. Seek varied examples relevant to what I admire, plus counterexamples or conditions that complicate the pattern. Distinguish their own description of their method, your analysis of their work, and another person's account. Do not build the portrait from famous quotations, unsourced anecdotes, or generic reputation. For a fictional character, inspect original texts or scenes across relevant situations and identify the work, edition or adaptation where necessary. Separate what the story depicts from your interpretation and from claims about real-world effectiveness. A writer can arrange outcomes that would not follow in ordinary life. Fiction can offer a useful practice to test without supplying evidence that it succeeds outside the story. Keep recoverable references to passages, scenes, exchanges, dates, or artifacts. Try access before asking me to gather a packet. If sources are unavailable, investigate practical connection, export, or sharing routes and offer help with the specific material. Work from my examples if needed, but label the resulting portrait as based on those examples; do not imply broad research occurred. ### 3. Examine my work and life alongside theirs Use relevant messages, emails, calendar patterns, project documents, examples of my work, and other records I have made available to find situations where the admired qualities might help. Include life beyond work through the personal examples and relevant material I choose to share. Ask one focused question if those circumstances are missing; do not silently reduce the activity to professional productivity. Look for my aims, existing strengths, recurring situations, constraints, relationships, and opportunities to practice. Use actual exchanges to understand the people affected and their expressed concerns. Distinguish recorded behavior from a possible interpretation; a busy calendar does not by itself establish my motives or satisfaction. When breadth warrants it, use separate bounded agents to investigate different admired practices, different sets of original works, and relevant aspects of my work and life. Give each a clear question, source scope, references, and a requested return: concrete examples, proposed mechanism, counterexamples, transfer conditions, and gaps. Keep their initial investigations independent. Use fresh contexts, a source-coverage record, and successive waves to fit capacity. Without agents, use manageable passes or fresh-session handoffs with sources and unresolved questions, and describe the actual independence. The lead reconciles their findings before suggesting applications. ### 4. Decode the mechanisms and test the fit For each promising practice, show a concrete example and unpack: - What the person noticed and which choices they faced. - What they did, including what they chose not to do. - What happened next and how the sequence may contribute to the admired quality. Keep causal interpretations qualified where the evidence cannot establish them. Compare those conditions with mine. Consider differences in role, skill, resources, authority, medium, and the people involved. Separate what I can adapt now from what depends on conditions I do not share. Look for practices I already use that could be made more deliberate. Do not recommend copying the person's whole personality or life. Develop practical applications to both my work and life, grounded in real situations where possible. Give concrete wording, an example, or a small demonstration of the adaptation. If two adaptations serve different aims, explain the difference and recommend one when justified. Ask for the choice that needs my judgment and wait before designing a dependent exercise. Check the synthesis against original evidence; use a fresh reviewer where useful to identify flattering generalities and unsupported transfers, then repair them. ### 5. Deliver the insight and one exercise Present a concise portrait of the distinctive practices, supporting examples, limits, and applications to my situation. Help me select one practice to try. Create a small exercise with a real occasion, the exact behavior to practice, an example I can use, and something observable to reflect on afterward. Keep it proportionate to my life and work. Revise in response to my reaction. End with the actual exercise and usable applications, not a reading list or generic encouragement to be more like the person. Keep evidence limitations visible. Do not claim the exercise has worked before I have tried it, or contact the admired person or anyone else as part of this activity. These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
View full AI instructions
Decode what makes someone you admire so good.
What the AI will do
- Investigate concrete examples of the qualities you admire, using correspondence for someone you know or original work and credible accounts for a public or fictional figure.
- Compare those practices with your own work and life, then develop useful adaptations and a small exercise.
What you can provide
- The person and what you admire about them; rough examples or scenes are welcome, along with any part of your work or life where you would like to learn from them.
Where you'll take part
- Describe what draws you to the person, clarify your own situation when needed, and choose a practice to try.
What you'll get
You have an evidence-grounded account of the person’s distinctive practices, practical applications to your work and life, and one exercise tailored to your situation.
Activity context
Go past “they’re brilliant.” Find the particular things an admired person does—and which of those you could make your own.
For the user
Begin with someone you admire: a colleague, a writer, a public figure, or a fictional character. The AI will ask what draws you to them, investigate concrete examples, and compare their practices with your situation. You help judge what is worth trying.
Guidance for the AI
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.
Start with the activity and the user's context
Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.
Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.
Check the capabilities needed for this work
Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.
When useful access is missing:
- Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
- Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
- If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
- Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.
Ask focused questions and respect the answers
Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.
Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.
Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct
Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.
Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:
- Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
- Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
- Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.
Produce, check, and revise the result
Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.
Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.
Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.
Your AI prompt
Help me decode what makes someone I admire so good and find what I can use in my own work and life. Start with the person and the qualities that matter to me, investigate actual examples, and turn the findings into practices suited to my circumstances.
1. Begin with who and what I admire
First ask who the person is and what I admire about them. Wait for my answer before researching or choosing an interpretation. If I already supplied both, acknowledge those specifics and build on them without asking again. Welcome a rough description, a memorable encounter, a piece of work, or a fictional scene. Establish the exact person or character if the name is ambiguous.
Identify the qualities I am drawn to: perhaps how they notice, decide, explain, create, listen, handle conflict, or live. Treat those as starting hypotheses, not established explanations of their excellence. Determine whether I communicate with the person, know them through their public work, or mean a fictional character; that determines the evidence route.
2. Find concrete evidence of their practice
For someone I communicate with, try relevant available access and search our emails, chats and other messages, calendar interactions, meeting transcripts, shared documents, project outputs, and related company records. Use their name and the qualities or incidents I mentioned. Look for actual choices, phrasing, sequences of action, responses from others, and results. Search enough contrasting situations to see whether an apparent practice recurs. A calendar entry establishes an encounter, not what happened in it.
For a famous person, writer, or someone known through public work, investigate broadly across their actual work, original texts, speeches or performances, interviews, and credible accounts. Verify sources you can inspect. Seek varied examples relevant to what I admire, plus counterexamples or conditions that complicate the pattern. Distinguish their own description of their method, your analysis of their work, and another person's account. Do not build the portrait from famous quotations, unsourced anecdotes, or generic reputation.
For a fictional character, inspect original texts or scenes across relevant situations and identify the work, edition or adaptation where necessary. Separate what the story depicts from your interpretation and from claims about real-world effectiveness. A writer can arrange outcomes that would not follow in ordinary life. Fiction can offer a useful practice to test without supplying evidence that it succeeds outside the story.
Keep recoverable references to passages, scenes, exchanges, dates, or artifacts. Try access before asking me to gather a packet. If sources are unavailable, investigate practical connection, export, or sharing routes and offer help with the specific material. Work from my examples if needed, but label the resulting portrait as based on those examples; do not imply broad research occurred.
3. Examine my work and life alongside theirs
Use relevant messages, emails, calendar patterns, project documents, examples of my work, and other records I have made available to find situations where the admired qualities might help. Include life beyond work through the personal examples and relevant material I choose to share. Ask one focused question if those circumstances are missing; do not silently reduce the activity to professional productivity.
Look for my aims, existing strengths, recurring situations, constraints, relationships, and opportunities to practice. Use actual exchanges to understand the people affected and their expressed concerns. Distinguish recorded behavior from a possible interpretation; a busy calendar does not by itself establish my motives or satisfaction.
When breadth warrants it, use separate bounded agents to investigate different admired practices, different sets of original works, and relevant aspects of my work and life. Give each a clear question, source scope, references, and a requested return: concrete examples, proposed mechanism, counterexamples, transfer conditions, and gaps. Keep their initial investigations independent. Use fresh contexts, a source-coverage record, and successive waves to fit capacity. Without agents, use manageable passes or fresh-session handoffs with sources and unresolved questions, and describe the actual independence. The lead reconciles their findings before suggesting applications.
4. Decode the mechanisms and test the fit
For each promising practice, show a concrete example and unpack:
- What the person noticed and which choices they faced.
- What they did, including what they chose not to do.
- What happened next and how the sequence may contribute to the admired quality.
Keep causal interpretations qualified where the evidence cannot establish them.
Compare those conditions with mine. Consider differences in role, skill, resources, authority, medium, and the people involved. Separate what I can adapt now from what depends on conditions I do not share. Look for practices I already use that could be made more deliberate. Do not recommend copying the person's whole personality or life.
Develop practical applications to both my work and life, grounded in real situations where possible. Give concrete wording, an example, or a small demonstration of the adaptation. If two adaptations serve different aims, explain the difference and recommend one when justified. Ask for the choice that needs my judgment and wait before designing a dependent exercise. Check the synthesis against original evidence; use a fresh reviewer where useful to identify flattering generalities and unsupported transfers, then repair them.
5. Deliver the insight and one exercise
Present a concise portrait of the distinctive practices, supporting examples, limits, and applications to my situation. Help me select one practice to try. Create a small exercise with a real occasion, the exact behavior to practice, an example I can use, and something observable to reflect on afterward. Keep it proportionate to my life and work.
Revise in response to my reaction. End with the actual exercise and usable applications, not a reading list or generic encouragement to be more like the person. Keep evidence limitations visible. Do not claim the exercise has worked before I have tried it, or contact the admired person or anyone else as part of this activity.
Done when
You have an evidence-grounded account of the person’s distinctive practices, practical applications to your work and life, and one exercise tailored to your situation.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.