Dan Martell - February 19, 2026


9 AI Skills You MUST Have to Get Ahead of 99% of People

Topics
prompt
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Dan Martell
Mentioned
Ben Affleck Chad GPT Gemini Skill Grok
I helped this kid change his life Is Dropshipping the method for 2026？

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Length

19 minutes

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207.93

Word count

4,147

Sentence count

198

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

It s actually pretty simple to get ahead of 99% of people with AI because most people don t have the right AI skills. I spent the last six years inside the AI trenches, building companies, developing internal tools, and teaching these skills to millions. And I can tell you the top 1% use AI in a completely different way. So I m going to show you the 9 AI skills that you can use to go ahead of the people, even if you re starting at zero.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 It's actually pretty simple to get ahead of 99% of people with AI because most people don't have
00:00:05.880 the right AI skills. I spent the last six years inside the AI trenches. I'm talking building
00:00:11.580 companies, developing internal tools, and teaching these skills to millions. And I can tell you the
00:00:16.480 top 1% use AI in a completely different way. So I'm going to show you the nine AI skills that you
00:00:22.880 can use to get ahead of 99% of the people, even if you're starting at zero. And the last one is
00:00:28.980 definitely my favorite. Starting with skill number one, prompt engineering. This is the skill of
00:00:34.340 talking to the AI models and creating prompts that get the best output. Think of it this way,
00:00:40.500 garbage in, garbage out, and you definitely won't get the result. So every good prompt has four
00:00:46.440 things. The first is it defines the role. You have to tell it to like act like a marketer,
00:00:51.260 act like a leadership expert, or act like a lawyer. Why? Because it's looking at all the
00:00:55.020 knowledge in the world. And it's saying this body of work is what I want you to pull from. So you
00:00:59.660 give me the best answer through that role. Next, we have to give it the context, you have to give
00:01:04.480 it all the information that you have about yourself. The more you tell it about your
00:01:09.040 situation, the better the response because it'll use that to craft its search query in the brain
00:01:14.720 called AI. Next, we have to give it a command, we have to give it very clear instructions on what
00:01:19.660 you need, the more specific your command, your request, the more dialed in the results are going
00:01:25.960 to be. And the last one is format. We want to tell it how to respond out. Do we want a PDF document?
00:01:32.620 We want bullet points. We want to put it in a table. Do we want as a spreadsheet? But I will
00:01:36.240 tell you this. If you have an example of world-class output that you've seen somebody else
00:01:41.060 or you've created before, giving it that to pattern match against is actually a cheat code.
00:01:46.120 Now that we've got your prompt dialed in,
00:01:48.720 now we actually have to learn how to fight with AI
00:01:50.980 to get it to do exactly what you want.
00:01:53.100 Which brings us to skill number two, taste curation.
00:01:56.120 The ultimate skill you can develop in this new world of AI
00:01:59.780 is knowing what great looks, sounds, and feels like.
00:02:03.340 For example, if you're starting a new product
00:02:06.080 and you need to come up with names for that product,
00:02:08.420 AI can give you suggestions.
00:02:10.000 It could write out 25, 50, 100 different names,
00:02:13.620 but it takes taste to know when you look at those hundred,
00:02:17.560 which are the one or two
00:02:18.500 that are actually gonna work in the market.
00:02:20.280 It reminds me of this quote by, of all people,
00:02:22.520 Ben Affleck, the actor,
00:02:23.820 and he was talking about like where AI
00:02:25.180 is gonna be challenged.
00:02:26.080 He said, being a craftsman is knowing how to work,
00:02:28.780 but art is knowing when to stop.
00:02:30.540 That is taste and that's your skill to develop.
00:02:33.140 So here are the steps to improve your taste,
00:02:35.120 but the last one is how you lock it in.
00:02:37.040 First, we have to create your taste library.
00:02:39.220 Where do you learn what great looks like?
00:02:41.220 I love to use social media.
00:02:43.280 I like to hear things that people say and write them down because I like the way it was said.
00:02:48.040 If you're a startup and you want to like get better at pitching your startup,
00:02:51.300 then you might go on YouTube and watch all the winners who ever pitched.
00:02:54.840 If you're a musician, go watch all the best acts of all time.
00:02:58.400 If you're a programmer, go review the code in GitHub from the best and most popular projects.
00:03:03.960 The way to get better is to curate a taste library of examples of what world-class looks like.
00:03:09.980 Next, we have to develop your communication skills.
00:03:12.400 here's why your words how you talk to the ai or how you talk to other people will actually craft
00:03:18.680 your world around you so if you want the best prompts you have to make sure you use the right
00:03:22.340 words to describe exactly what you're looking for so for example when you're communicating to your
00:03:27.180 ai you have to be specific so you'll say things like i need a max line length of 100 characters
00:03:32.980 i do this all the time for instagram notes or you might want to use the word leader not boss
00:03:37.680 those two different words will get different outputs in what you're trying to accomplish
00:03:41.580 understanding the words that align with your taste is the meta skill people that are great
00:03:47.920 at a topic because you've studied greatness will talk about the work differently and the ai will
00:03:53.820 actually respond and it'll shape the output to match that and finally as i mentioned this is
00:03:59.100 how we lock it all in we have to learn how to implement universal rules what this means is to
00:04:03.880 continue to craft your prompts by giving it repeatable direction so for example you might
00:04:09.460 always be saying, write in ninth grade English. I use this one very often. Or use similes over
00:04:14.200 examples. Keep sentences short. Avoid cheesy quotes. No em dashes. That's the biggest one.
00:04:19.380 I want to encourage you to start building the ability to write down your taste. When people
00:04:25.060 hear taste, they think it's this like kind of sixth sense for what is great. You know, like,
00:04:29.580 I can't tell you why. I just have a taste around it. It's like, no, you actually, if you document
00:04:33.520 it and wrote down things, there's like specific outputs of what makes it something you like.
00:04:37.600 and the more you learn to write them down,
00:04:39.600 the better you're gonna be able to get AI
00:04:41.340 to do exactly what you wanted.
00:04:42.880 And by the way, if you're struggling with any of this
00:04:45.200 and really implementing AI in your business,
00:04:47.440 I'm giving away my internal AI playbook
00:04:49.820 on how to deploy AI in every department in your business.
00:04:53.020 Just DM me AI business on Instagram,
00:04:55.160 Dan Martell on Instagram,
00:04:56.220 or click the link below in the description.
00:04:57.760 I'll send it over to you.
00:04:58.900 Now, with your taste dialed in,
00:05:00.920 it's time to make sure every response the AI gives you
00:05:04.380 is fully personalized to you.
00:05:06.360 Skill number three, create a master prompt.
00:05:09.260 If ChatGPT sounds like a stranger,
00:05:11.680 it's because you've never properly
00:05:13.160 introduced yourself to it.
00:05:15.080 Here's why a master prompt is so valuable.
00:05:17.500 You essentially have a document
00:05:18.960 that's got everything about you, your role,
00:05:21.440 all the context.
00:05:22.840 And when you go to prompt,
00:05:24.200 you hit that little file icon
00:05:25.740 and you upload that document.
00:05:27.520 I do this for all the different roles in my life,
00:05:29.320 even being a dad, if I'm doing like kid questions.
00:05:31.640 So the answers are so freaking dialed.
00:05:34.140 Everyone on my team has a master prompt.
00:05:37.360 They have to.
00:05:38.220 There's just no world where you're gonna be good at AI
00:05:40.500 if you don't have a master prompt to guide it.
00:05:43.160 It's the reason why 92% of my team's work
00:05:46.360 is supported through AI
00:05:48.000 because we've taught them to do what I'm about to share
00:05:50.680 with you so that every output is hyper-personalized.
00:05:54.300 This is the first step to get your whole team
00:05:57.020 way more efficient, way more productive using AI.
00:06:00.260 Here's how we do that.
00:06:01.320 And the last one is a little trick
00:06:02.680 to ensure that you don't have to start from scratch
00:06:04.560 as new platforms launch.
00:06:06.320 First, just tell the AI, act as an interviewer
00:06:10.140 and ask me everything needed
00:06:12.360 to build a master prompt for my role.
00:06:14.760 And then it'll sit there and it'll write down
00:06:16.680 all the questions that you need to answer
00:06:19.240 so that it can create this document.
00:06:21.120 Next, you have to answer those questions.
00:06:23.280 Make sure you give it as much detail as you possibly can.
00:06:26.060 Now, if you want a trick,
00:06:27.620 I recommend use the voice to text feature
00:06:29.700 where it's like a little microphone icon
00:06:31.740 and then you just click it
00:06:33.060 and then you talk reading through all the questions
00:06:35.520 and just allow yourself to ramble.
00:06:37.300 The more you give it, the better it is
00:06:39.120 because it's gonna take everything you gave it
00:06:41.140 and then insert it into the answers
00:06:43.500 and it's gonna do it really concise way
00:06:45.180 so that we can produce this master prompt.
00:06:47.700 And last, once you have all that, say to it,
00:06:50.960 generate a master prompt and save it as a PDF.
00:06:53.740 This is the trick.
00:06:54.820 See, saving that information as a PDF
00:06:57.420 allows you to upload that PDF to every AI out there
00:07:01.600 and even the ones that haven't even been built yet.
00:07:03.660 So it future-proofs you around other AIs 1.00
00:07:05.840 that come out that are more powerful
00:07:07.020 so that you can come into that platform from scratch
00:07:09.660 and have it act as if you've been using it for years.
00:07:12.880 This becomes your digital ID no matter where you're at.
00:07:15.880 Now with that, the AI knows who you are,
00:07:18.520 but context alone won't put you in the top 1%.
00:07:21.500 You need to make sure your output is as polished as possible,
00:07:25.000 which brings us to our next skill, output iteration.
00:07:28.680 The challenge with most people
00:07:30.080 is they don't fight enough with AI.
00:07:32.360 They get an output and they're like,
00:07:33.440 man, that's good enough, I guess.
00:07:35.180 I'm not that guy.
00:07:36.460 I fight for it.
00:07:37.700 I tweak it.
00:07:38.720 I play with it.
00:07:39.980 It's almost like there's a piece of clay
00:07:42.100 and it can do anything.
00:07:43.220 And I'm like pulling pieces of the clay away
00:07:45.660 till I get the shape of the object that I want,
00:07:48.140 which is the output.
00:07:48.960 And I'm going back and forth with it
00:07:50.660 until I get exactly how I want to look.
00:07:53.100 For example, if you didn't see the Christmas commercial
00:07:56.160 that Coca-Cola use 70,000 AI prompts to generate,
00:08:01.080 that's an example of fighting with AI
00:08:03.200 and iterating to get it to do exactly what you want.
00:08:06.140 And those 70,000 prompts were made by just five AI experts.
00:08:10.900 So think how many times they prompted per expert
00:08:13.740 to make it do exactly what they wanted.
00:08:15.820 The top 1% iterate to perfection.
00:08:19.100 And here's the truth.
00:08:19.800 To be able to polish your outputs
00:08:21.540 through this iterative process,
00:08:22.960 you need to follow these three steps.
00:08:24.660 And the last one, nobody knows about
00:08:26.700 that I personally use almost every time I chat with AI.
00:08:29.880 So the first thing we have to do,
00:08:30.840 and we just talked about it,
00:08:31.840 is we have to upload our master prompt.
00:08:33.900 It's gonna give you all the context
00:08:35.440 for your specific role to prime your prompting.
00:08:38.720 The second is once it gives you an output,
00:08:41.120 give it specific feedback.
00:08:43.580 Don't say make it punchier, anybody does that.
00:08:46.100 Instead say open with a strong reframe
00:08:48.360 that talks about how X, Y, and Z.
00:08:50.740 Like I want you to really ask yourself,
00:08:52.840 what does it mean to be punchier?
00:08:54.140 And finally, don't get stuck on the tiny details
00:08:56.900 because things keep changing every time you prompt it
00:08:59.820 because I use this feature
00:09:01.400 that most people don't know about called Canvas
00:09:03.480 to allow myself to lock it in
00:09:06.000 and then I can tweak it manually.
00:09:07.820 So for example, if you're working on an email
00:09:09.680 and every time you prompt it to rewrite the email,
00:09:12.320 it kind of changes too much,
00:09:13.700 you can ask it to write the email as a canvas.
00:09:17.220 It'll create almost like a Google Doc within ChatGPT
00:09:20.260 that you can click on to tweak words, sentences,
00:09:23.020 create new paragraph breaks or whatever, and then say it, use that format that you just created
00:09:28.780 to write the next 10 emails. That one feature canvas will change the game for how you iterate
00:09:34.520 with AI. Okay. Now that you've iterated to the perfect prompt, it's time to lock it in so you
00:09:40.380 can repeat it over and over and over again, which brings us skill number five, system prompts.
00:09:46.040 A master prompt is a document that tells the AI who you are, context.
00:09:52.140 A system prompt is essentially instructions to tell the AI how to behave.
00:09:57.780 This is what's mind-blowing.
00:09:59.680 AI is the first technology that is actually programmed not in computer code, but in words.
00:10:06.300 Which means anybody who can speak any language, which is the 4.9 billion people on the internet right now, are now AI programmers.
00:10:14.680 and the way we program it is through the concept
00:10:17.820 of a system prompt.
00:10:19.160 It's just most people are never taught this.
00:10:21.140 Now, this may sound a little scary,
00:10:22.920 but trust me, it's way easier than you think.
00:10:25.820 And I'm gonna teach you the three steps to create one.
00:10:28.120 And if you get to the third,
00:10:29.320 you'll never have to think about it again.
00:10:31.160 The first thing we have to do
00:10:31.920 is we have to grab the final output
00:10:33.700 that you just iterated against using AI
00:10:36.020 and then write this prompt.
00:10:38.060 Write the system prompt
00:10:39.120 that would have generated this exact output.
00:10:41.220 it. And what it does is it writes the actual system prompt. You might have never seen one
00:10:46.500 before, but you'll see how detailed it is, how it breaks it up into structure. Then the next step
00:10:52.620 is to save it as a PDF because now with a PDF document, now you can use it in like, maybe use
00:10:58.220 Claude or Gemini or Grok or any other platform because the PDF is there with the instructions.
00:11:04.080 The cool part is they all kind of talk similar and a system prompt from one AI will work for
00:11:08.680 another AI. Now the last one and the most powerful, if you're using chat GPT, for example, you can
00:11:13.320 actually turn that code into a reusable component called a custom GPT by copying and pasting the
00:11:20.460 output into the instructions of a custom GPT. It's more advanced, but the benefit is that I can then
00:11:26.640 share the link to it with anybody on my team. So for example, I created one called the book
00:11:31.740 architect, which essentially takes a topic and a person's name does a massive research project
00:11:37.280 and writes a book on behalf of all the content
00:11:40.340 they've already put out in the world that I can read.
00:11:43.340 I know, it's wild.
00:11:44.860 So now that we've got like the master prompt
00:11:46.640 figured out for a role
00:11:47.460 and the system prompt for the instructions,
00:11:49.100 you need to actually teach AI
00:11:51.000 on how to push back on your ideas and nobody does this.
00:11:55.340 Which brings us to skill number six,
00:11:57.080 using your AI as a critic.
00:11:59.220 AI is designed not to fight with people.
00:12:02.260 They made it almost like a people pleaser.
00:12:04.300 The truth is the pros, like myself,
00:12:06.220 We use AI to expose our blind spots.
00:12:09.120 I want it to give me my harsh reality.
00:12:12.120 See, if it's just a yes, man,
00:12:13.600 then I'm just gonna get a reflection
00:12:14.920 of my thoughts that I already want.
00:12:16.540 But if I get it to push against me,
00:12:18.120 I'm gonna get a better version of myself.
00:12:20.340 For example, just last week,
00:12:22.040 I used it to rebalance my investment portfolio.
00:12:24.780 I gave it the goal of what I'm trying to accomplish,
00:12:26.840 which it knew.
00:12:27.680 And then I said, hey, here's some decisions I wanna make.
00:12:30.240 What do you think?
00:12:30.920 And it pushed back.
00:12:32.100 I didn't wanna hear those things.
00:12:33.700 There were some things I wanted to buy
00:12:34.780 that I thought I should buy.
00:12:35.680 there were some companies I want to invest in that I want to invest in. And guess what it said?
00:12:39.180 No. And here's why. And you said, and this is what's right. And I'm like, why are you so smart?
00:12:45.780 So as long as you give it a direction and tell it to push on you, it's going to show you who you are.
00:12:50.340 I mean, there's an incredible prompt you should try out. Tell me about the things that I need to
00:12:55.720 know about my psychology that's been holding me back that I've never asked you. You're not going
00:12:59.400 to like the response, but guess what? It's going to shine a light on a path that you might need
00:13:02.720 to go down. Here's how we use AI to critique our thinking. And the last one is actually how to
00:13:07.360 reintegrate it so that it's always there. So the first thing is we want to ask AI to act like a
00:13:12.300 devil's advocate and put that in the role section of your prompt. And then it'll stress test all of
00:13:17.700 your assumptions and it'll list all your risks, but you have to tell it to do that. Next, we have
00:13:22.540 to ask it to break down all the criticism they gave you through the lens of first principles,
00:13:27.760 which is a physics concept. The cool part about this is it's going to decompose everything
00:13:32.620 it told you down to the fundamentals.
00:13:34.880 And it'll help you rebuild the answer through base truth.
00:13:38.180 So not only will it be very critical
00:13:40.600 and give you the feedback that you might not wanna hear,
00:13:43.300 but it's gonna teach you how to think about its answers,
00:13:46.380 which is so freaking valuable.
00:13:48.140 And lastly, if you agree with its assumption,
00:13:50.740 here's the cool part.
00:13:51.940 Capture the insight and update your master prompt.
00:13:54.880 Give the master prompt back to the AI
00:13:56.600 and then give it the insight and tell it,
00:13:59.320 update this context as my role
00:14:01.660 so that your answers always follow this principle so now that you've got ai fighting with you and
00:14:06.780 you get to like real core answers the problem is that now you might have too much okay and then ai
00:14:13.580 gets confused so that's why you need the next skill context compression i know you may not know
00:14:18.940 this and you're probably not going to believe me but it's possible for you to give ai too much
00:14:24.860 too much information too much context what happens when you give it too much context it actually
00:14:29.820 spits back i don't know what to do with all this the ai can process a lot of information you give
00:14:35.020 it it just can't process everything for example the other day i was working on tweaking my dan ai
00:14:40.140 system and essentially i had two million words of context i wanted to learn against ai can't deal
00:14:47.260 with two million words so i had to do a pre-compression process to essentially compress
00:14:52.460 the context say that 15 000 times fast into 200 000 words using ai what it did is it took that
00:14:58.860 and it compressed it into very detailed and specific context that i can then use to actually
00:15:05.100 train my ai so if you have a lot of information you're gonna need to know how to do this so that
00:15:10.620 you can get ai to consume it all here's how we do it first thing is we have to just paste the mess
00:15:15.660 give it everything i'm talking transcription data all the context and then say this say summarize
00:15:21.020 this transcript with bullets for key facts data and stories reduce it down to 10 of his original
00:15:26.460 size. See how specific that is? The second is we have to ask it, what's missing from the original
00:15:31.620 information and list it out and give me the option to bring it back because it might have actually
00:15:36.780 summarized out some of the context that you need in there for the prompt to work. And lastly,
00:15:42.260 lock it in. Use the compressed knowledge as the only context in the next prompt, meaning you use
00:15:47.420 that information and start a new window and prompt with that compressed context. So essentially,
00:15:52.880 you take a big mess. You tell AI to pre-process it into only the important stuff for the context.
00:15:58.680 Then you say, what did you take out just in case I want it back? And then you got the final verdict
00:16:02.120 that is the input to the new prompting. You see, it's not as complicated as it sounds. So now that
00:16:07.740 you have your compressed knowledge, it's time to make sure your AI workspace isn't an absolute mess,
00:16:12.600 which brings us skill number eight, knowledge-based gardening. Just like a garden, your AI knowledge
00:16:18.320 base is going to need some weeding once in a while. When ChatCBT came out, my whole team jumped
00:16:24.760 on it, all buying their own accounts, running prompts, training their AIs, but everything was
00:16:29.840 a freaking mess. Nobody was consistent. Everybody was using different data to train it. So I had to
00:16:35.060 sit down and I taught everyone how to use the concept of projects to keep everything clean,
00:16:40.460 like a well-curated garden. I learned a long time ago with AI, a messy mind creates messy prompts
00:16:46.240 and worse outputs so here's three things that you can do to organize once and reuse forever first we
00:16:52.320 have to create a project folder for each initiative so essentially think about a project an outcome
00:16:57.280 just name it correctly so for me i have it for all my key projects i even have a folder for all my
00:17:03.200 investments so that i can put all the context in those project folders and i'm always making sure
00:17:07.840 that the name is very clear if you're in a team use a team account next we have to upload our
00:17:13.200 master prompt into that project. So it has the context on your role and the compressed context
00:17:18.980 also to the project. So that compressed context might've came from a PDF that you saved it in
00:17:23.860 so that you have your master prompt. You have the compressed context and you have anything else you
00:17:27.860 wanted to give it that needs to fit within that project. And lastly, keep your best system prompts
00:17:32.720 in an organized folder by department in a PDF form so that you can reuse it. Again, you want
00:17:38.460 to future-proof yourself around switching different AIs because I guarantee the one you're using today
00:17:43.100 may not be the one that wins in the future keeping those pdfs updated and in folders by departments
00:17:49.180 is going to make this process easy now this last skill has been easily the biggest game changer
00:17:54.940 for me and it'll allow you to easily get ahead of 99 of people if you do it right skill number nine
00:18:01.980 personalized learning ai is the future of education but 99 of people don't use it that way one of the
00:18:09.580 the things that I do almost daily is to ask Chad GPT to create a research paper in a story format
00:18:16.040 on any topic as deep and nerdy as I want to get. And then I can just listen to it when I'm at the
00:18:21.660 gym. Here's how we do it. First, write a simple prompt and tell it how much time you have to
00:18:26.700 learn. Just anything. Say, teach me AI. I've got seven minutes. Next, we want to ask it to put in
00:18:31.100 a simple conversational language. I like to use grade levels depending on the topic. Because if
00:18:36.180 it's ai i mean i go to fifth grade level because we get a bunch of metaphors that really don't give
00:18:39.780 me details but you can say like seventh grade language if you prefer so for example write a
00:18:45.280 10 minute research paper on the history of ai for a seventh grader so then lastly just click that
00:18:51.420 play icon and then you put your airpods on and you can just listen to the answer while you're
00:18:55.960 walking around or doing stuff or going to the gym this is a thing chat gpt isn't a chat bot that's
00:19:04.040 actually just a use case of ai it's more than that it's a creative operating system stop using
00:19:10.840 it for simple tasks use it to co-create the world ahead of you use it to help you with your goals
00:19:17.320 and where you can't see your blind spots and conversations with people that you should be
00:19:21.880 having that you've been putting off or text messages that you're afraid to reply to because
00:19:26.120 you don't know what to say just ask it if you stop playing in beginner mode and start using ai
00:19:32.120 the right way, it will make you an expert in life because 99% of people are just not using AI this
00:19:39.600 way. And if you do, you will easily find yourself in the top 1%. And remember, if you want my
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