Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit

ChatGPT Custom Instructions are mysterious and powerful. For the woefully (and shamefully) uninitiated, it’s a function of ChatGPT that allows you to give background information on who you are, and how you want ChatGPT to respond to you.

This is crazy awesome! The only problem: no one uses them. This is crazy terrible.

Using Custom Instructions properly can completely transform your experience with ChatGPT. Custom Instructions will help you turn ChatGPT into a personalized, always-on, super-smart coach and tutor that knows who you are, your strengths and weaknesses, and the people in your life, so it can help you make better decisions and achieve your goals. You won’t have to explain anything twice because it will already know enough context about you to help—and it will do so in ways that surprise and delight you.

Let me give you an example. 

Recently, I was playing around with the idea of starting a new course for Every—and I wanted ChatGPT to help me decide whether to do it. I prompted it with one sentence: “i'm thinking about starting a new course. can you help me think it through?” I did this without Custom Instructions to start and got this back:

“Of course! Making a decision about starting a new course is significant and can benefit from a structured thought process. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you think it through:

• Define Your Goal: Why do you want to take this course?
• For personal development or interest....”

Big fat F. It completely misunderstood the question—it thought I wanted to take a course and not build one—and the advice it gave me was decent but banal.

Then, I turned Custom Instructions on and gave it the same starting prompt. Here are a few of the responses (emphases are mine):

“Purpose: What's the primary goal of the course? Is it to augment your existing offerings at Every, serve as a standalone product, or something else?”

“Content Depth: Given your love for detailed, intellectual writing, how in-depth will you go on each topic?”

“Guest Contributions: Do you plan to involve guest experts, perhaps even some of your writing heroes or team members like Kate Lee and Evan Armstrong?”

“Time Investment: Given that you're already grappling with being too opportunistic and dutiful, how will you allocate time for this without sidelining your creative work or burdening yourself?”

This is SO. FREAKING. COOL. 

ChatGPT reeled off gem after gem. It knows about Every, the company I run. It knows who’s on my team at Every and asks me how they can help. It knows what kind of writing I like to do so it can help me integrate it into the course planning. And the kicker: it knows that I’m working on being a little less opportunistic—on not jumping on shiny new things, and staying focused on longer-term priorities. Because it knows this it can ask, “Are you sure this is a good idea given your tendencies, buster?”

Custom Instructions are good enough that I’d go so far as to say it is a crime if you are not using them. It’s a theft of your talent, time, and potential. So I am laying the gauntlet down now: 

If you are a subscriber to Every in 2023, and after reading this article, you’re still not using ChatGPT Custom Instructions, I am going to find you and whip you with a wet noodle until you do.

Why? It’s not that hard—and the benefits are enormous.

In this article, I’ll walk you through what ChatGPT Custom Instructions are and how to use them. I’ll share ideas for how to get the most out of them, and even share my custom instructions so you can steal them for yourself.

Ready? Let’s get going.

What are ChatGPT Custom Instructions?

You can think of ChatGPT as a genius amnesiac. It’s a genius because during its training it read and ingested the entire internet. But it’s an amnesiac because, now that it is trained, it cannot form new memories. Every interaction is like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates: it has to learn who you are (and why it loves you) over and over again.

Because we live in the real world and not in a romantic comedy, this is annoying and time-consuming. You have to continually repeat information, and you won’t use ChatGPT to its full potential because it will miss ways to help you.

Fortunately, Custom Instructions fixes this. It doesn’t stop ChatGPT from being amnesiac, but it does mitigate it. It works like the dossier that politicians get before a meeting with an important donor: they read the file and know all of the important information they need even if they’ve never met the donor before.

With Custom Instructions, every time you start a new chat, it rereads its dossier, learns who you are and how you want it to talk to you, and formulates a response. 

The only problem is, unlike a politician, you have to write the dossier on yourself:

These blank text boxes are intimidating—so much so that I skipped out on using Custom Instructions for a while. I just couldn’t find a way in. Luckily, I’ve written this guide to help you with that.

Custom Instructions is split into two categories: Biographical Info and Response Style. We’ll go through how to set up each in the following sections.

Biographical info: how to tell ChatGPT who you are

Name and bio

The first thing you’ll want to do is give ChatGPT your name and bio. I wrote mine like this:

“My name is Dan Shipper, I'm a writer and entrepreneur based in New York. I run Every (https://every.to)—a newsletter about startups, tech, AI, and personal development.”

If writing something like this is hard for you, just go to your LinkedIn profile and copy and paste it into ChatGPT. Ask it to summarize your LinkedIn in three sentences and presto—you’ll have a bio you can use. 

Projects and goals

The next thing you’ll want to inform Custom Instructions about are your current projects and goals.

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