This week, I was talking to my engineering friend, and he mentioned that he’d figured out a way to improve the output of his AI responses. He showed me how changing the prompt had resulted in a significantly improved response on something he was working on. But his insight was about how he improved the prompt. He asked AI to write the prompt for him! It returned a better prompt, which resulted in a better response. It was akin to him saying, Show me how to ask you questions in a way you understand best. Later in the week, I tuned in to a webinar in which the presenter used a similar technique to generate his prompts. I was hearing the same technique from two credible people in the same week.

I’ve been trying to improve my prompts for a few months, but I never considered this approach. I tried it today while I was using AI to help me with some tasks, and the results were much better. I’ve read and listened to a lot of stuff about prompting over the last few months, but this is probably the one thing that’s improved my prompting the most.

Going forward, I’ll ask AI to write or edit my prompts for me.

One thing that resonated with me in Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind was the idea of studying failure. The book mentions that Charlie Munger studied failure to improve his decision-making. Munger studied the failures of others as a way of understanding thinking errors, which is studying psychology.

This got me thinking. I want to be more intentional about studying failure. I get excited about hearing what worked from entrepreneurs, but I need to be equally (or more) excited to learn about their failures and the why behind them. I’m really curious about psychology and want to keep improving my own decision-making, so this approach is appealing.

I think the first step is to regularly analyze my own failures and mistakes. I’m going to put some thought into ways I can make this a habit and see if I can adopt strategies others have used successfully.

In a post last week, I shared an unexpected data issue with the “book library” MVP project. The book databases we planned to use have quality issues. Lots of other companies use the data, so it’s not terrible, but it’s not ideal. I initially saw two paths: we can use data with flaws, or we can build a pristine data set from scratch.

I thought about it, and I decided to do both. I want to keep things moving, so we’ll start with the data from the existing book databases. That will allow us to launch the MVP’s next version faster. The data won’t be 100% accurate and might limit what features can be built. But the starting database will have a limited number of records, and we’ll start with a small number of early users. It won’t be perfect (and doesn’t need to be), but we can get something out and start the feedback loop sooner, which will lead to improvements.

After that phase, we can tackle creating a pristine database (if it’s needed). The learnings from the prior phase should also help us figure out what features to build or, more importantly, not build, around the pristine data.

I’m reading Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, which is a book about the mindset of Warren Buffett and other investors. One of the things it discusses is how Buffett and other investors make decisions. Robert Hagstrom points out that to understand psychology is to understand human decision-making. That’s why successful investors like Charlie Munger studied psychology to improve their own decision-making.

I’ve never thought much about psychology,  but this book got me thinking about it in relation to entrepreneurship—specifically, entrepreneurial wisdom. In this post, I shared that wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in a manner that aligns with the outcome you desire. Wisdom means changed behavior and improved decision-making—knowing what to do and when to do it.

I’m always looking for ways to improve my decision-making (and share what I learn). But I’ve never really thought about trying to understand psychology to accomplish this until now. Hagstrom has me interested in learning more about psychology.

I’m going to try to find one of two books about psychology and add them to my reading list.

My book project started with me reading biographies about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned. During that process, I realized there’s no central repository of all the wisdom of entrepreneurs who came before us. I decided to create one and came up with this mission:

Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

This project is super early, but I’ve been thinking about the impact it could have. The thing I keep coming back to is economic mobility. Starting a business that becomes successful is the fastest way to climb the economic ladder, which is why I think entrepreneurship is such a powerful force. Families who struggled financially for generations have seen their circumstances change in a few years because they started a successful business. There are numerous examples of family patriarchs and matriarchs starting businesses and their families still benefiting economically many generations later. Their descendants have continued to climb the economic ladder because of their business (or the resources it created).

Entrepreneurs still must do the work. There’s no substitute for execution and no shortcut to it. But if this project is successful, I can see it boosting many entrepreneurs. Making learnings of notable entrepreneurs easily accessible and helping other entrepreneurs figure out how to apply them could accelerate their velocity and increase their chances of success. If more entrepreneurs are successful, more people, and their families, will experience economic mobility and, hopefully, economic independence.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 39
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 238
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read a third book on David Ogilvy - a collection of his learnings about advertising
• Demoed first major feature for “book library” MVP
• Refined and ranked sub-feature list for “book library” MVP
• Defined data views for “book library” MVP
• Updated list of competitors for “book library” MVP
• Analyzed database sources for book data

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a framework book, biography, or autobiography
• Share taxonomy drafts with one person
• Refine list of fields for database tables
• Create idea bank for growth strategies

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred forty-four was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week  

What I learned:

• I overestimated what I could get done during this holiday week. I need to get more realistic about where my time goes during holidays. I always think I’ll have lots of free time, but I never do.
• There’s no easy way for people to share what books they’ve read on their personal websites or blogs. You can share on platforms like Goodreads, but not your own.
• Entrepreneurs (anyone, really) can obtain books for free from many websites, but entrepreneurs don’t use them.
• Sharing what you’ve learned from books is a manual, inefficient process. If it were easier, I wonder if more people would share what they’ve learned from books they’ve read.
• Creating a tool to annotate a book isn’t as technically difficult as I’d thought.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

As I was poking around on the internet over the holiday, a book written by an indie hacker entrepreneur caught my eye. Traditional places like Amazon don’t sell the book. Instead, this entrepreneur is not only self-publishing but also self-distributing the book—the only place you can buy it is his website. I’ve seen this before, but it definitely piqued my interest.  

The founder does two things that made me lean in more (and want to purchase his book). First, he posts stats about book sales: total books sold since launch, total revenue generated, and number of books sold today were prominent. I hadn’t seen this before, and I loved it. I took it as his way of communicating how much value has been provided to others—in the aggregate and recently. And it’s more social proof.

Second, the book is never finished. He’s constantly updating it as he learns new things. He shows the last time he updated the content and the last time he published new book files. The book was written about five years ago, his last update was within the last twenty-four hours, and new files were published today (as of this writing). I like this approach because his book content stays current. I’ve never seen this before.

This entrepreneur is doing a great job of marketing his book, and he got me excited about it. I’m going to grab a copy and add it to my booklist.

I’ve been working on the next version of the “book library” MVP with a developer friend. Living the problem this past summer by reading, taking notes, blogging, podcasting, etc. is coming in handy. The insights are helping with feature prioritization and nuances around how it’s built.

One thing I didn’t expect that we’re encountering this week has to do with data. We’re finding errors and weird record relationships in book databases that we’d planned on using. My gut instinct is to create our own pristine database by aggregating and cleansing the data from various sources. But that’s a decent amount of work, and I’m not sure we need to do it for what I want to accomplish with the MVP. I’ll think about it some more over the next few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a great holiday!