I want you to picture something. You own a Ferrari.
It's this marvel of engineering, incredible speed,
precision, just raw power. Right. But every single
day, you only use it to drive two blocks to the
grocery store. That is the perfect analogy. I
mean, we have this engine of like infinite potential
sitting right on our desktops, and we're just
using it to write out of office emails. Today,
we are going to stop driving to the grocery store.
Welcome to the Deep Dive. It is January 21st,
2026. And we are getting an early look at a guide
dropping tomorrow. It's called 12 Advanced Chat
GPT Tricks for Power Users. And it's basically
the manual for the Ferrari that nobody ever bothered
to read. The premise here is interesting. The
author argues there's this huge gap between the
tourist and the wizard. The tourist asks for
a summary. The wizard, well, what is the wizard
doing differently? Oh, the wizard is playing
a completely different game. They're building
memory systems. They have incognito modes for
their thoughts. They have AI agents building
software for them, you know, while they sleep.
So let's bridge that gap. We have 12 tricks to
get through today. Let's start with section one,
which is really about the mindset. The guide
says that even now, in 2026, something like 95
% of users are missing these hidden features.
They're still acting like it's 2023. Right. If
you're still typing, summarize this or write
me a blog post, you're essentially eating AI
fast food. The system can do it, sure, but there's
no depth. A power user knows the tool isn't just
a chatbot anymore. It's more like an operating
system for your work. It makes you wonder, though.
We have this tool that can simulate complex reasoning,
yet we just default to the easiest path. Why
do we settle for surface -level use? We simply
don't know what we don't know yet. Fair point.
Okay, let's get into the mechanics. Trick number
one is context -specific writing memory. This
one solves the generic voice problem. So most
people have one setting, one voice for ChatGPT,
but you don't talk to your boss the same way
you talk to your team. Hopefully not. That could
get awkward. Exactly. So the trick here is you
stop using a generic instruction like be professional.
Instead, you feed the AI actual examples. You
paste in an email you wrote and say, analyze
this for tone and style. And here's the key part.
You then say, store this as team emails. So instead
of prompting it every time, it just knows. If
I say I'm writing to the team, it's casual. If
it's for a client, it's polished. Yes. You build
out these personas, a client persona that's super
formal, a LinkedIn persona that's more punchy.
The AI just remembers which mask to wear depending
on the context. It does raise a question about
authenticity. If I have an algorithm managing
my personas, does this erase our authentic voice?
No, it just scales our different personas efficiently.
Okay, trick number two shifts from how we speak
to how we listen. It's called scheduled daily
reports. Yeah, this is where we see the big shift
from reactive to proactive. I mean, usually you
have to go to ChatGPT and ask it for something.
This lets the AI nudge you. So we're inviting
the machine to nag us now. In a useful way. You
set a trigger. Every morning at 8 a .m., send
me updates on OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic,
and bam, a desktop alert. Or you could have it
send you a weekly goal review every Friday afternoon.
It's interesting. We spend so much of our digital
lives trying to filter out notifications, and
now we're programming a machine to send us more
of them. Does this reduce the noise or just add
to it? It filters the noise so you focus on signal.
Let's move to trick number three, project -only
memory. This sounds like a privacy feature. It
is, but it's also a sanity feature. By default,
ChatGPT remembers everything account -wide. So
if you tell it about your dog's birthday in one
chat, it technically knows that when you're writing
a legal brief in another. Which is not great,
especially if you're juggling multiple clients.
Right. So project -only memory is a toggle. You
find it in the gear icon when you start a new
project, and it builds a walled garden. That
project can only see the files and chats inside
of it. Nothing else. So my data for client A
and client B will never, ever cross -pollinate.
Precisely. And the guide points out something
really critical. You have to make this choice
at the start. You can't change it later. It seems
like we're constantly negotiating these boundaries
with our tools. Is privacy the ultimate luxury
in AI? Compartmentalization is safety. Leakage
is unprofessional. Moving on. Trick number four.
New personalization settings. This is the death
of the old text box. You know, we used to have
to type out, please be professional, or explain
this like I'm five. Now, under settings, there
are just drop -down presets. Presets, like filters
on a photo. Exactly like that. Friendly, candid,
professional, you just click. But the real power
move is stacking them. You choose the friendly
preset. Then you fill out the about you section
with your specific goals. And then you use those
memory tricks we just talked about. It's all
about layering context. It's about alignment.
The tool stops feeling like a generic robot and
starts feeling like a colleague who actually
gets you. I find those labels so interesting.
Friendly. Why do we feel this need to anthropomorphize
the tool with friendliness? Because we work better
when the vibe matches ours. All right. Trick
number five. Temporary chats. This is basically
the incognito mode for AI. There's a little icon
in the top corner, a chat bubble with a slash
through it. I see. And this does what exactly?
When you click it, nothing is saved. No history,
no memory is trained on it. It's just gone when
you close the tab. What's the use case for that?
Well, hypotheticals. Let's say you're a CEO.
You might want to ask, if I were a competitor
to my own company, How would I put us out of
business? You do not want that stored in your
long -term account memory. Right. Or if you just
need to do a quick one -off math problem. Exactly.
You don't want a random question about baking
soda to influence your coding advice three weeks
later. It suggests that memory can be a burden.
So why is forgetting just as important as remembering?
Freedom to experiment without polluting the long
-term data. Trick number six. Company knowledge
base. Now we're getting into the enterprise stuff.
Yeah, this is for the business plan users. It
connects ChatGPT to everything. Your Google Drive,
your Slack, your HubSpot, everything. So it's
not just searching the public web. It's searching
our internal world. Right. You can ask, what
meetings do I have tomorrow? And can you find
the related files in Dropbox? It'll scan your
calendar, find the meeting, go into Dropbox,
find the right PDF, and summarize it for you.
That used to be a 20 -minute scramble. Where
is that file? Was it in Slack? Was it in an email?
Now it's one prompt. It turns the AI into a single
search guard for your entire work life. It's
efficient for sure. But are we outsourcing our
organizational brain? We're reclaiming time spent
hunting for files. Next up, trick number seven,
chat GPT apps. This is the ecosystem play. You
know how you tag someone on social media with
the at tip symbol? You can now do that with software
right inside the chat. Give me an example. How
does that work? So you type at Photoshop in the
chat bar. You say, create a social media graphic
for this post. It doesn't just make a flat image.
It connects to Photoshop. And you can even edit
the properties. Or at Notion to save your chat
notes directly to a workspace. The lines between
the apps are just dissolving. It's all becoming
conversation. The chat bar is becoming the universal
interface. You don't open apps anymore. You just
call them when you need them. So is the interface
itself just dissolving into conversation? Yes.
The chat bar is the new operating system. Trick
number eight, updating custom GPTs. This is a
classic maintenance issue. You might have built
an amazing custom GPT six months ago when it
was running on, say, GPT -4. But now we have
GPT 5 .2. And for anyone who doesn't know, a
custom GPT is basically a version of ChatGPT
you've trained for a specific task. Correct.
But here's the catch. They don't always update
themselves. You have to physically go in, click
Edit, and manually select the newest model. Otherwise,
you've got that Ferrari, but with a lawnmower
engine inside. And you can even do this with
GPTs that other people have built. Yep, there's
a drop -down. If you're using a public one that
feels a bit sluggish, check the model. You can
often override it to the latest version yourself.
It's like digital hygiene. Why is maintenance
so often ignored in our digital tools? Invisible
decay is easy to miss until performance drops.
Trick number nine, batch image generation. This
one is all about speed, pure speed. DLE is now,
what, 4x faster in this 2026 update? So you don't
ask for one logo idea, you ask for four at once.
Minimalist, bold, abstract, and gradient. And
it generates them all simultaneously. All at
once. It completely changes the creative workflow.
It's not... Wait, critique anymore. It's generate
a batch, pick the best one, and refine from there.
But does that speed devalue the creative choice?
Speed allows for rapid iteration and better final
choices. Now, trick number 10, canvas mode mini
apps. I have to admit, when I was reading the
source material, this is the one that really
stopped me in my tracks. Oh, this is the wow
moment. This is the one that really makes you
feel like a wizard. Whoa. Just to define it for
everyone listening, Canvas mode is a split screen
that shows you code on one side and a live app
on the other. Exactly. And you don't need to
know a single line of code. You can just say,
create a to -do list with a dark mode, toggle,
and local storage. And it just builds it. It
just appears. It appears. Code on the left, a
fully working app on the right. You can click
the buttons. It works. You can build mortgage
calculators, little games, productivity timers.
And then you can just download the code and put
it on your website. That's profound. We used
to need a team of engineers for that. Now all
you need is a sentence. What happens when creation
has zero friction? Everyone becomes a builder.
Ideas become reality instantly. Trick number
11. Deep research plus custom knowledge. Okay,
so... Deep research has been around for a little
while. It scans the web. It reads articles. But
the real trick is the combination. You upload
your own files first. So you're anchoring the
research in your own context. Yes. Let's say
you're researching market pricing. You upload
your own internal pricing model spreadsheet.
Then you say research competitor pricing. It
doesn't just give you a generic list. It compares
the world's data directly against your data.
It's synthesizing the external with the internal.
Context is king. Right. It stops giving you generic
advice because now it knows your specific constraints.
So is this the end of generic advice? Context
is king. Generic answers are now obsolete. And
finally, trick number 12, extended thinking mode.
This is one I struggle with personally. Oh, so?
And I think a lot of us do this. I get lazy.
I have this bad habit of just leaving the model
on auto. I'll ask it a really complex question,
get a mediocre answer, and then I spend the next
20 minutes trying to fix it. I call it prompt
drift. I think we've all been there. I know I
have. You just want the answer now, so you try
to coax intelligence out of the faster mode.
Right. The trick is to manually select extended
thinking mode. It forces the AI to pause. It
actually thinks for, you know, 30 seconds to
two minutes. It plans, and it checks its work
before it gives you an answer. The difference
between a reflex and a reflection. Exactly. For
strategy, for architecture. For any complex problem,
you have to let it think. There's even a heavy
mode for pro users that thinks for even longer.
We're so used to instant gratification. Is patience
the new skill we need to relearn? Waiting 30
seconds beats an hour of correcting errors. And
there's a bonus trick in the guide, chat branching.
This is for all the non -linear thinkers out
there. You're in a conversation and you get to
a fork in the road. Should I write a funny email
or a serious one? And usually you have to pick
a path. Not anymore. You click. branch into new
chat and suddenly you have two parallel timelines
so just so we're clear branting means creating
a new conversation path from an existing message
right in one timeline you explore the funny email
in the other you explore the serious one you
can explore both realities at the same time without
losing your original place it's like a multiverse
of thought and you can save these branches into
a project to synthesize them later it's like
a whiteboard strategy session but in text form
Does this finally reflect how the human mind
actually works? Absolutely. Nonlinear thinking
is finally supported by the tool. Mid -role sponsor
placeholder. So let's just try to unpack all
of this. We've covered 12 tricks. Memory injection,
proactive scheduling, privacy walls, app integrations,
these deep thinking modes. It's a lot. It can
definitely feel overwhelming. It is. But if you
zoom out and look at the big picture. The theme
isn't really about the software. The software
is just the engine. The real theme is about the
driver. Exactly. The tool didn't get smarter
between yesterday and today. You get smarter
by knowing these buttons exist. We started with
that Ferrari analogy. The difference between
the person going to the grocery store and the
race car driver isn't the car itself. It's the
knowledge of how to shift the gears. And knowing
that you don't have to settle for the default
settings, you can mold this thing to be your
perfect co -pilot. So here's my challenge to
you as you're listening right now. Don't try
to do all 12 of these today. You'll just burn
out. Pick one. Just one. Maybe it's setting up
the about you personalization. Maybe it's trying
that canvas mode to build a simple calculator.
Yeah, just try one thing. See how it changes
the friction in your day -to -day workflow. The
gap between the tourist and the wizard isn't
intelligence. It's just curiosity. Go find the
hidden buttons. See you in the deep end.