From ChatGPT beginner to power user

Hey,

Most people use ChatGPT at about 10% of what it can do. They type a question, get an answer, and that’s it, basically a chattier Google. Nothing wrong with that, but they’re leaving the best parts in the box.

The jump from casual user to power user isn’t about being smart or technical. It’s a few settings most people never touch and one habit. Today I’ll give you the shortcuts that move you up fast.

IN THIS EMAIL

» Custom instructions, the setting that changes everything » Projects, and writing in your voice » The one habit power users have

⚙️ Custom instructions

This is the single biggest upgrade, and almost nobody uses it. Custom instructions let you tell ChatGPT, once, who you are and how you want it to respond, and it remembers across every chat.

Tell it your context (what you do, who you serve) and your preferences (be direct, skip the disclaimers, ask before assuming). Now every answer comes pre-tuned to you instead of starting from the generic default every single time. Set it once, benefit forever. If you do nothing else from this email, do this.

🗂️ Projects and voice

Two more that separate casual from pro.

Projects let you keep related chats and files together with their own instructions, so you’re not re-explaining context every time. A project for your content, one for your business, one for a specific client, each remembers its own world.

Voice. Power users don’t accept generic output, they feed the model samples of their writing and tell it to match. Five minutes of “here’s how I write, sound like me” turns ChatGPT from a robot into something that actually sounds like you. (I did a whole issue on this, it’s in the archive.)

These aren’t advanced tricks. They’re just settings sitting there that most people scroll right past.

🔑 The one habit

Here’s the real divider: power users iterate, casual users accept.

A beginner takes the first answer. A power user reads it, then says “good, now make it shorter,” “now in a more skeptical tone,” “now give me three versions.” The magic almost never lives in the first response. It lives in the second and third nudge. Treat it like a conversation with a sharp assistant, not a vending machine, and your results change overnight.

📗 The full path

I laid out the whole beginner-to-pro path, step by step, as a free resource:

→ ChatGPT from Zero to Pro

Start with custom instructions today, that’s the one with the biggest payoff for the least effort. Then come back for the rest.

• László

P.S. If you’d rather your whole team operate at the power-user level, with AI built properly into how you work, that’s what we set up at Growth Lab Studios. Start here.

P.P.S. Want the back catalog? Every past issue lives in the newsletter archive.