Tell Me What You Prompt, and I'll Tell You Who You're Becoming

If I looked at your last 100 ChatGPT prompts, I could probably tell you what you want from life.
Not who you say you are. Who you're becoming.

Looking at my own prompts, one theme keeps coming back: financial independence.
Not because I dream of yachts or private jets, but because I'm after something much simpler: optionality. The ability to choose how I spend my time.

Whether you are a snob wanting to fly private to parties in Saint Tropez, or having your own small place close to the beach without having to look at the balance account every time you want to go out for dinner with your favourite people.

Morgan Housel argues that wealth isn't expensive things—it's optionality. The freedom to say no. Ironically, "How do I become financially independent?" is also one of the most common questions people ask AI. Maybe that's because our prompts reveal the gap between where we are and where we'd like to be. If you like to think about these topics, I strongly recommend Morgan Housel's content. The Psychology of Money. You are Welcome ;)

Five years ago, AI became conversational enough that millions of people stopped using Google for life's hardest questions. We don't just ask AI how to code anymore. We ask it who we should marry, whether we should quit our jobs, how to become happier, how to raise children, or how to find purpose.

Every conversation teaches the model something about us. But the more interesting question is whether it teaches us something about ourselves. Our prompts are tiny windows into our ambitions, fears, insecurities and curiosities. But not enough to have our best intentions in the future, there are no rewards or penalties for the models. AI has no stake in the outcome. It doesn't celebrate our success or suffer our failures. It simply optimizes for the objective we describe.

We increasingly ask AI the questions we once reserved for mentors, close friends, or that wealthy uncle who always seemed to have life figured out, and the model infers the results with the context we provide (with more or less precision). We still need to own the decisions and their consequences while expecting the model to disclose the formula to bypass the hardship towards success, whatever that means to us.

AI optimizes for the objective you give it. Humans, however, are terrible at defining their true objective. You might ask how to make €10 million, and AI may correctly conclude that building a regional cleaning-services empire is statistically one of the highest-probability paths. The problem isn't the strategy. The problem is that you never wanted to spend the next decade thinking about commercial cleaning.

The model solved your prompt, not your life.

Have a good one,
Fredi