Prompt: Profound Thinking Partner

How I come up with profound ideas to write about (and my first writing outline)

These are the writing strategies and prompts I’ve used to grow to more than 3,200 newsletter subscribers in less than 6 months here on Substack, with many of my posts having gone viral/semi-viral.

I’ve been messing around with this prompt for some time now and I think it’s fucking insane.

It’s a thinking partner.

You give the prompt a topic, an idea, or research notes on what you want to write about, and it will question you and help you discover profound ideas in your thinking. Then, once you’ve brainstormed enough, the prompt summarizes your thinking into an outline draft, which you can use to write free or paid newsletters, blogs, articles, or YouTube videos.

It also gathers every profound idea spotted within your thinking, and lists them out for you so you can tick them off as you include them in your own writing. You can also use these profound ideas as inspiration for short form posts.

I don’t like having AI write for me, and this prompt does the complete opposite.

It helps you to discover the building blocks you need to write something unique.

But it also mines deep for ideas that make your perspective authentic, your contrarian belief and your signature writing angle.

Two people could use this prompt to brainstorm the topic of “How to read a book,” and neither of them would come out with the same ideas and outline draft.

This is one of those use cases where AI can be leveraged to amplifying your creative thinking, not make it stupider. The prompt doesn’t think for you, it challenges your thinking so you can flex your mental muscles and become more creative.

I really like it, I think you will too.

If you don’t know where to start in your writing journey, this prompt will give you everything you need.

I use Claude for this prompt, but you can use an AI model.

Go come up with some profound ideas for your writing!

Here’s the prompt:

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