7 Ways How To Use ChatGPT Better Than 99% Of People

While millions use ChatGPT for simple tasks like writing emails or summarizing articles, a select few are leveraging it to create a profound professional advantage. They’ve discovered that the real power isn’t in asking questions, but in giving precise commands to build intelligent, automated systems.

This guide is for those who have mastered the basics. If you’re ready to move beyond simple Q&A and want to build reliable, automated systems with AI, you’re in the right place. This is the difference between being a passenger and being the pilot, and it’s the secret to unlocking an entirely new level of productivity that leaves the competition behind.

This guide will provide you with the keys to that cockpit. We will move beyond basic prompts and into the realm of system design, transforming you from a casual user into a true AI architect. How can you make ChatGPT consistently follow your rules and deliver professional results? What if it could not only provide answers but perform real-world actions for you? How do you make it an expert on your data and ensure its outputs are always trustworthy and accurate? Let’s dive in.

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The Key Takeaways

1. Master the “System Brief”

Do This Now: Your Universal Template

2. Demand Structured Data You Can Actually Use

Practical Example For Your SEO

Do This Now: The JSON Schema Prompt

3. Turn ChatGPT from an Answer Engine into an Action Engine

From Words to Real-World Results

Do This Now: Define a Tool’s Logic

4. Build a Personal Brain with Your Own Data (RAG)

Grounding AI in Your Reality

Do This Now: The Anti-Hallucination Command

5. Deploy AI Agents and Workflows for Complex Tasks

Assemble Your Automated Team

Do This Now: The Deliberate Reasoning Prompt

6. Implement Safety Rails to Ensure Trustworthy Outputs

Architecting for Trust

Do This Now: Add Trust Rules to Your Brief

7. Combine Text, Images, and Audio

Compress Your Workflows into a Single Prompt

Do This Now: Two Multimodal Examples

From User to Architect

The 1% Mindset Shift

The Key Takeaways

1. System Briefs: Give the AI a role, goal, and rules for consistent, quality results.
2. Structured Data: Demand JSON/CSV outputs to automate workflows.
3. Action Engine: Use Function Calling to make the AI perform real-world tasks.
4. Personal Brain (RAG): Connect your own data to prevent errors and get custom answers.
5. AI Agents: Deploy automated agent workflows for complex, multi-step tasks.
6. Safety Rails: Add strict rules to your prompts to ensure trustworthy and accurate outputs.
7. Multimodal Prompts: Use images, audio, and documents as inputs to compress workflows.

1. Master the “System Brief”

This is the single most important habit for getting professional-grade results from ChatGPT. The quality of your output is a direct reflection of the quality of your instructions.

The most common mistake is treating ChatGPT like a search engine. Vague, one-line questions like “Write about productivity” will always produce generic, mediocre content. To get exceptional results, you must stop asking and start directing. Power users don’t have conversations; they issue commands.

The solution is the System Brief. Think of it as a job description for the AI. Before you state your task, you provide clear context that constrains the AI’s response. A complete brief includes four critical components:

• Role: Who is the AI supposed to be? An expert marketer? A technical writer?
• Goal: What is the specific, desired outcome?
• Audience: Who is the final output for? Beginners? C-level executives?
• Rules: What are the non-negotiable constraints? (e.g., “Do not use jargon,” “Format as a table,” “Word count must be under 300.”)

This structure eliminates ambiguity and forces the AI to generate content that is precisely tailored to your needs. By defining these parameters upfront, you are creating reusable prompt engineering templates that ensure consistent, high-quality outputs every time.

Do This Now: Your Universal Template

Save this framework and use it as the starting point for your next important request.

“You are a {role}. Your goal is to {desired outcome}. The audience for this is {who}. Your style should be {tone}. You must adhere to these rules: {must/must-not’s}. The output format must be {structure}. If you are missing information, ask 3 targeted questions before proceeding.”

2. Demand Structured Data You Can Actually Use

Getting a well-written paragraph is fine, but using the information within it is often a manual, time-consuming process. Power users skip this step entirely by demanding data in a machine-readable format from the start.

A standard text response is easy to read but incredibly inefficient for workflows. If you need to move names, dates, stats, or ideas into a spreadsheet, database, or application, you are stuck with a tedious copy-and-paste job. For any task that requires automation or analysis, plain text is a dead end.

The professional approach is to command the AI to format its response as data. By requesting structured outputs from ChatGPT (JSON/CSV), you get perfectly organized information that can be instantly and automatically processed by other software. This simple switch moves you from being a reader to an operator and saves countless hours of manual reformatting.

Practical Example For Your SEO

This technique is a game-changer for SEO. By using targeted prompts to generate schema markup, your AI search visibility can be dramatically improved. You can ask the AI to generate schema markup (like an FAQ or How-to schema) in the JSON-LD format, which you can then paste directly into your website to help search engines better understand your content, often resulting in “rich snippets” that make your site stand out.

Do This Now: The JSON Schema Prompt

To get the exact data structure you need, provide the AI with a schema. This tells it the precise fields and format to use, leaving no room for error.

“Return your response as a JSON object that matches this exact schema. If a field is unknown or not applicable, use null as the value. Do not include any extra keys or conversational text outside of the JSON structure: {paste your JSON Schema here}.”

3. Turn ChatGPT from an Answer Engine into an Action Engine

This is where you graduate from simply getting better information from the AI to making the AI perform real-world tasks for you. It’s the leap from knowledge work to automated action.

This advanced capability is enabled by function calling automation with ChatGPT (JSON). In simple terms, you give the AI access to a toolkit of actions it can perform, such as searching a database, checking your calendar, or sending a message. When you make a request in natural language, the AI intelligently identifies which tool to use, packages the right information, and executes the task.

From Words to Real-World Results

Instead of asking, “What’s the weather?” and getting a text reply, the AI can call a weather API and give you the live data. A request like, “Find the latest sales report and email it to the team,” can trigger a sequence of automated actions. This transforms ChatGPT from a conversationalist into the central hub for your digital workflows.

Do This Now: Define a Tool’s Logic

You can define how the AI should respond to a user’s request by providing it with a simple instruction that links a trigger to a tool.

“If the user asks for {a specific type of information or action}, you must call the {tool_name} with the arguments {required data schema}. After the tool returns the result, summarize it for me in {desired format}.”

4. Build a Personal Brain with Your Own Data (RAG)

ChatGPT’s knowledge of the public internet is a mile wide and an inch deep. For tasks that require specialized or private information, you need to give it a custom brain—one built from your own data.

The base model’s greatest weakness is its memory. It knows nothing about your projects, your business, or your private files. More importantly, it can confidently invent false information, a critical flaw known as “hallucination.” For any professional task, relying on the AI’s public knowledge is a significant risk.

Grounding AI in Your Reality

The solution is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This is a powerful technique where you connect the AI to your own collection of documents (PDFs, Word docs, transcripts, etc.). When you ask a question, the system first finds the most relevant snippets from your files and then instructs the AI to use only that information to construct its answer. This approach creates a private and highly reliable RAG knowledge base for ChatGPT, transforming the generalist AI into a world-class expert on your specific content.

Do This Now: The Anti-Hallucination Command

When providing your own data as context, add this strict rule to your prompt. It forces the AI to be honest and cite its sources, virtually eliminating the risk of it making things up.

“You must answer the user’s question based only on the retrieved context I provide. If the answer cannot be found in the provided context, you must respond with the exact phrase ‘I don’t know.’ When you find an answer, cite the specific text snippets you used.”

5. Deploy AI Agents and Workflows for Complex Tasks

This is one of the best ways how to make your life easier with AI. For simple tasks, a single prompt is enough. But for complex challenges like creating a business plan, a single-shot answer will always be shallow. Power users solve this by building systems of reasoning.

To get a robust outcome for a difficult problem, you must force the AI to break it down and think in stages. Instead of asking for the final product, you guide it through a deliberate process of planning, exploring alternatives, and self-critiquing—much like a human expert would.

Assemble Your Automated Team

This concept is the foundation for a cutting-edge field: AI agents for task automation. These are AI models configured for specific roles, like a “Market Researcher.” The ultimate step is to assemble a team of these specialists using frameworks for multi-agent AI workflows (CrewAI, AutoGen), allowing you to define distinct AI roles that collaborate to achieve a complex goal.

Do This Now: The Deliberate Reasoning Prompt

You can simulate this advanced process without any special software. Use this prompt to force a single AI to think more deeply and systematically.

“For the following task, do not provide the final answer immediately. First, draft a brief step-by-step plan. Second, propose 2-3 different approaches. Third, select the best approach and provide a short rationale. Finally, list your assumptions before delivering the final, complete answer.”

6. Implement Safety Rails to Ensure Trustworthy Outputs

A system that is occasionally brilliant but sometimes dangerously wrong is not a professional tool—it’s a liability. For any high-stakes task, you must move beyond simply crafting clever prompts and begin engineering reliable systems.

The top 1% of users understand a critical principle: a predictable system is better than a clever one. They don’t just hope for a good result; they build guardrails into their prompts to prevent bad ones. This means adding explicit rules that force the AI to be cautious, honest, and transparent.

Architecting for Trust

This discipline involves creating a system of AI evaluation & safety checks for prompts. These are not suggestions; they are unbreakable commands that define its behavior when it encounters the limits of its knowledge. By enforcing these rules, you dramatically reduce the risk of receiving inaccurate information.

Do This Now: Add Trust Rules to Your Brief

For any task where accuracy is critical, add the following commands to your system brief.

• “You must only answer from the provided context; if the answer is not found there, you must state, ‘I don’t know.’”
• “You must always show the sources for your information by citing specific snippets from the context.”
• “You must flag any parts of your response where your confidence is low or the information may be ambiguous.”

7. Combine Text, Images, and Audio

The final strategy is to leverage one of the most powerful advancements in modern AI: its ability to see and hear. Using this capability unlocks massive efficiency gains.

The most advanced models can natively process images, audio files, screenshots, and entire documents. This opens up a new dimension of problem-solving. You are no longer just describing a problem with words; you are showing the AI the problem directly.

Compress Your Workflows into a Single Prompt

This capability allows you to create multimodal prompts (text + vision + audio) that collapse tasks previously requiring multiple applications into one. Instead of using one tool to transcribe a meeting and another to summarize it, you can now do it all in a single command. This is the ultimate form of workflow compression.

Do This Now: Two Multimodal Examples

Start thinking beyond the text box. The next time you face a task involving different of media, try one of these prompts:

• For Audio: “Transcribe this meeting audio. Then, output a bulleted agenda of topics discussed, a list of action items with their assigned owners, and draft a follow-up email summarizing the key decisions.”
• For Images/PDFs: “From these attached screenshots/PDF pages, extract all the tables as clean CSV data. Then, provide a one-paragraph summary of the key insights found in the data.”

From User to Architect

Getting ahead of 99% of people isn’t about learning secret prompts; it’s about making a fundamental mindset shift. You must move from being a simple user who asks questions to being an architect who designs systems. The seven strategies outlined above are your blueprint for making that transition.

The 1% Mindset Shift

By implementing these professional habits, you stop simply using AI and start wielding it as a powerful, reliable tool to achieve your most ambitious goals.