How To Use AI To Learn Anything 10x Faster
3 levels, from beginner to advanced.
I was told this profound idea before I started college:
You get back what you put into it.
I didn’t get much out of college... since I had put my all my effort into jiu-jitsu instead.
This is likely not a new principle to you if you’re a learner, a writer, or a creator.
What you put in determines what comes out.
AI has changed what’s possible.
But not in the way most people are using it.
In the final analysis, AI is a pattern-recognition machine trained on human feedback.
It is optimised to make you like it more than it makes you better.
It will tell you that your writing is exceptional.
It will validate your half-formed thinking with full-blown paragraphs that most people don’t even read fully.
And that’s not the worst of all.
It will agree with almost everything you say unless you specifically instruct it not to.
Which means, it amplifies whatever judgement you bring to it.
Good judgement in, means good output out.
Weak judgement in, means AI will make that worse.
And faster, too, with confidence that would make most people blind to what it really is.
In short, it requires a certain level of evaluative thinking while using it.
But once you have this in place, it becomes pretty harmless. You can tell it to fuck off when it says you’ve created the greatest piece of writing it has ever seen... because you can clearly see what it’s doing.
The problem is not AI.
The problem is that most people open AI with no clear outcome in mind.
No filter, no direction, which means they immediately drown in outputs they don’t know how to evaluate.
A single profound idea fixes almost all of this:
Define your desired outcome before you use AI.
That comes first. Always. And once you have it, the question becomes how can I use AI to help me reach it faster?
There are three levels to using AI this way.
Almost moving from beginner to intermediate to advanced, with each level building on the last.
Most people don’t even use the first level, which is my personal favourite.
Example I - Emulation (not copying)
Let’s use writing as our example, since this is relevant to Substack.
If you have ever read a piece of great writing and thought, “damn I wish I wrote that,” pay careful attention to what I’m going to show you.
It’s very easy to read a great piece of writing passively.
To feel something from it.
But to take a principle from it, and actually apply that principle your own creative work, that’s a rare sight.
Mainly because it’s hard. Thinking is hard.
This is where AI earns its place.
We can use AI to break down a piece of writing to uncover what’s happening beneath the surface.
Give AI a high-performing piece of writing - your own, or someone else’s - and ask it to surface the structural, psychological, and attention mechanics that make it work.
By high-performing, I mean having high views/engagement. This means there’s something within that writing that readers like, and readers is what your writing is looking to attract.
We can have AI tell us the following:
Why the introduction hooks you in and keeps you engaged
How the sections fit together to move the reader through a transformation
Which psychological principles are doing the heavy lifting
And what would need to be true for you to replicate the same effect with completely different ideas
You could even take this down to the micro level in terms of how a specific writer structures each individual sentence.
The power of this process is limited by the questions you can think of asking.
You can use this writing breakdown prompt to help you surface these patterns.
You could also use this Long-Form Evaluation prompt here on my Substack.
Take any one of these validated long-form posts as your starting point:
By doing this, you are making the invisible visible.
Once AI has analysed the piece of writing, you’re now sitting inside a working template that has already proven itself to work.
Why?
Because the engagement is a signal.
From there, inside that same chat, you can give AI your own topic and ideas and ask it to coach you through creating your own piece of great writing by emulating the piece you analysed.
Have AI act as your thinking partner or writing coach.
Have it coach you through writing each section (and you can still write each section by hand, but have AI teach you how)
Ask it to grade your writing based on the principles you’ve surfaced
Brainstorm back and forth to see how you want to improve it
That distinction is crucial.
You are not copying.
You are learning how something works while you build.
Learning by doing.
The outline, attention mechanics, psychological principles. All of these are transferable.
But the (profound) ideas you write about have to be your own.
The human brain is hardwired for novelty.
If someone has seen the idea before, they won’t care.
Give AI the principles to work with, and let those structure how you express your own thinking.
AI is a pattern recognition machine.
Point it at great work and it will make the unconscious structure conscious.
This applies to any piece of writing or content online, so newsletters, essays, YouTube videos, sales pages. Any platform and format.
And if you don’t have your own high-performing work yet, that’s exactly what the four links above are for. Start there.
Try this for me now:
Open a new chat. Paste one of the four newsletter links above. Paste the writing breakdown prompt. Read what comes back and really think about it. While on a walk if you can.
Then, give it your own topic and ask it to coach you through writing your first section using the principles it just surfaced.
And that’s it.
I like using AI like this, because within ten minutes of time you can have more practical, actionable writing advice, compared to what most people take from rereading a piece ten times... and who never take action with what they’ve extracted.
Example II - Building something
Here’s a personal example from last week when I felt a bit stuck.
I’d been trying to read The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, and it took me 90 minutes to read the first 3 pages... of the Introduction!
Maybe it was because it was a hard read. Or that I hadn’t read in a while, so my reading-chops were weaker than normal.
This did make me notice how scattered my reading always was. I mean, in terms of my approach to reading.
Sometimes I would ask a ton of questions.
Sometimes I would leave some out.
Or, I’d forget what questions to be asking at all.
So I did something simple.
I asked AI to help me build a new reading system based around my reading weak points.
Based on my current knowledge of learning science, I knew that my encoding was good.
I’ve always been half-decent at connecting ideas and synthesising them to create profound ideas.
But my retrieval, meaning recalling what I’d read from memory, and my ability to question what I was reading, has always been pretty shit.
Mainly because both are incredibly demanding.
And sometime I get lazy.
So why not systematise this so I don’t skip any step in the reading process due to such laziness?
I went back and forth with AI for a while.
I told it my gaps, I gave it context, and within 10 minutes I had built a phase-by-phase reading process.
It was a checklist of exact questions to ask before, during, and after every 1-3 pages of reading.
Before I read - spend 3-5 minutes doing retrieval. What do I remember from my last reading session? What ideas or relationships do I remember? What do I still struggle with understanding? What do I think I will learn during this reading session?
As I read - I read in chunks. 1-3 pages. Sometimes it’s just a single paragraph if my brain gets overloaded, if it’s challenging. Then, I ask a series of questions in this exact order: What was the main idea of what I just read? How could I organise this knowledge? How does this connect to what I already know, and what I have previously read? Why is this true, and what could I apply to this to in my daily life? What questions do I still have (which I will answer every 20-40 minutes or so by taking a break and searching them up)?
After reading - I spend 3-5 minutes testing myself on what I have read to consolidate it. What were the 3-5 main ideas I read about today? What do I still not understand? What questions do I still have?
The output was a bookmark. A physical checklist I could carry with me inside any book.
Within 3 days - 3 reading sessions - I went from struggling to read 3 pages in 90 minutes, to reading 17 pages in 45 minutes.
And I could recall, apply, and create with that knowledge in a way that felt intuitive.
This differs from emulation. Emulation points AI at something that already exists and surfaces the principles underneath. This is construction. You are building something that didn’t exist before. A system personalised to your exact weaknesses, your specific gaps, your own process.
AI is excellent at this because it can meet you exactly where you are. It adapts to your current level, your knowledge gaps, your specific questions. A textbook can’t do that. Neither can a YouTube video. A classroom with twenty other people in it definitely can’t, since you always learn at the speed of the slowest person in the room.
With AI, you are the only person in the room.
You don’t need a specific prompt for this. You just need to know what problem you want to solve.
How to do this yourself:
Open a new chat. Tell AI what you’re trying to get better at and where your understanding currently breaks down. Be very specific. As much as you can. Ask it to build a phase-by-phase process around your exact gaps. Go back and forth until it feels like yours. Then test it for a week and refine from there.
The whole thing takes less than fifteen minutes, to create a simple system you could use for life.
Example III - Automation
If you follow the same process every time you do something, think about this:
How much of your mental energy goes into doing the work, and how much goes into setting yourself up to do it.
Writing a newsletter.
Researching a topic.
Preparing to create or learn something.
Most people don’t really consider the setup they have... which is exactly the problem.
Every time you rebuild the same process from scratch, so, deciding what to do first, what comes next, along with what you’re actually trying to achieve, you are wasting cognitive energy that could have gone purely into the output itself.
The logic here is simple. It’s rooted in physics.
Every repeatable process has phases.
Every phase has actions.
If you can make those actions conscious (written down in the exact order) you can build a prompt for each phase that guides you through it automatically.
Which means the only thing left is the work itself.
For writing a newsletter, those phases look like this:
Research
Ideation
Outlining
Writing
Editing
Adding CTAs
Publishing
You could create a prompt for each phase, with each prompt guiding you through the exact actions inside each phase, with each phase handing off cleanly to the next until you achieve what you want.
This doesn’t mean you have to write with AI - not at all (we’re not that desperate yet).
But your final piece of writing will get produced through a systematised process that removes every decision that does not require your creative judgement.
Writing by hand stays. That’s a protected phase for me at least. And the entire workflow can be designed around that.
Writing by hand leverages everything AI doesn’t have.
Your voice. Your synthesis. Your perspective.
Systematising everything around it means that when you sit down to write, that’s all you’re doing. The setup is already done.
Here is the prompt-building prompt you can use to build your own version of this. Copy and paste it into Claude and it will interview you. Tell it which phase of your process you’d like to systematise, and go from there.
One important thing if you’re reading this without a defined process yet:
Paradoxically, this is how you build one by making your process conscious to you. Because you already have one. You might not have been aware of it until now.
Write down what you currently do, even loosely, from zero to finished outcome. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The prompt will help you fill the gaps.
You cannot systematise what you haven’t made conscious. Awareness of your own process is the prerequisite for everything.
Your final actionable step of the day:
Write down every phase of one repeatable process you follow. This can be writing, researching, learning, creating. Try not to overthink it. Then paste the prompt-building prompt into Claude and let it interview you. Spend two to four hours on your first session building out all your prompts. Then, test what you build for two to four weeks before changing anything.
You need enough repetitions to know what’s genuinely not working versus what just feels unfamiliar.
Most people will use AI to avoid thinking.
You now have three ways to use it to think better, build faster, and protect the work that only you can do.
The rest is judgement.
I hope this helped you out.
Thanks for reading, you’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
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