How to Prompt
It happened quietly.
I was sitting with a friend who knows more about finance than anyone I know. The kind of person I used to turn to for questions I didn’t know how to answer. But that day, I didn’t ask. The question was still there, in the back of my mind. I just didn’t feel the need to say it out loud.
That’s when I noticed it.
Lately, I’ve been turning to AI more often than I care to admit. Not for everything—but for a lot of things. Questions about history, science, travel, recipes, taxes, investing. Questions that once lived on the edges of conversations now find their answers in the calm glow of a screen.
There’s something strangely comforting about it. No judgment. No hesitation. No interruption. Just space to ask anything, however naïve or obscure, and to keep going until things make sense.
It’s efficient. It’s convenient. And, if I’m honest, it feels safer than asking a person.
There’s a small shame in admitting that. A quiet embarrassment in realizing I sometimes trust the collective intelligence of the world’s human knowledge trained into a system, more than I trust the opinions of the people I know. Not because the people are wrong. Just because the machine never seems to mind when I ask again, maybe in a different way, trying to see if I get a different answer.
But something else has been happening too—something I didn’t expect.
As AI has taken on the role of explaining the world to me, I’ve found myself asking people fewer questions about what they know and more about how they feel.
I’m no longer as curious about where they went on their last trip, or how they booked their flight, or what restaurant they recommend. I can find that online. What I want to know now is what it felt like to be there. What changed in them. What stayed with them.
There’s a depth in emotion that no dataset can recreate. A texture in lived experience that no algorithm can imitate.
In the past, I may have believed we are logical beings who occasionally feel emotion. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. More and more, it seems to me that we are emotional beings who sometimes use logic to explain what we already feel.
In many of the circles I spend time in—professional, cerebral, head-oriented—so much energy goes into understanding. Into knowledge. Into the mind. It’s all very sharp. But it often feels like something is missing.
What’s missing is the part that doesn’t need to make sense.
The part that simply feels.
A chatbot can tell me what the economic indicators were during a financial crisis. But it cannot tell me what it felt like to lose a job, to call a parent for help, to wake up with dread for six months in a row and still try to smile at work.
A chatbot can give me ten ways to roast a cauliflower, ranked my nutritional value. But it cannot describe the smell in the kitchen, the memory it stirred, the pride in serving it to someone who didn’t expect to be moved by the dinner.
These days, I’m starting to ask different questions to the humans in my life.
Or sometimes, asking no questions at all—and just listening. Waiting for something deeper to emerge. Not the facts of someone’s story, but the feeling that shaped it. The emotion that lingers long after the logic has been explained away.
And in that space, I find inspiration.
That’s the word I chose for this year—inspire. Not to be impressive, but to be moved. To let something stir in me that I didn’t know was possible. And more and more, that stirring comes from presence, not answers.
I still use AI every day. Maybe every few hours. But when I’m with someone, I no longer need them to be informative. I just need them to be human.
And that is how I learned to prompt.
