You Ask, I Answer: Better AI For Personal Growth?

In today's episode, Frederick asks, what's a better approach to get more value out of AI for personal growth and deep learning instead of surface level answers? So at the risk of being uh sounding flippant, surface level answers come from surface level questions and surface level data. If you do not provide AI with enough data in a format that it is optimized for reading and digesting, it is not going to do a good job for you. If you it's kind of like working with like a therapist or a doctor or or any trained professional, if you walk into your doctor and it's like, I don't feel well, and and and that's all you give your doctor, the doctor your doctor's gonna be like, Well, I'm not sure what I can do for you. But here's some generic high-level advice, you know, drink some more water, get some get good sleep, eat healthy food, and you're like, wow, that's unhelpful.

That's subsurface level answers. Well, of course it is. You gave very surface level data. Um, if on the other hand, you have highly specific things like, oh, when I eat this food, I feel worse, or when I would do this exercise, I feel better, or um, these are the things that are causing me stress, or you know, are you allowed the doctor to do some blood work and things, then you get better answers because you're giving more data. AI is no different.

If you're trying to use it for personal growth and personal self-development and self-improvement, that's great. But remember, AI knows nothing about you. It has no idea who you are, has no idea what you care about. You have to be the one to provide all that information. And today's tools, even the smaller models can process that information, but they need a memory system and they need uh thinking and they need good tool calling.

So if I were to devise a system today using AI that would be focused on personal improvement first, I would have it be something local, meaning that you're not handing your data to a third party, right? If you're talking about self-improvement and stuff like that you're talking about stuff that's pretty that can be pretty sensitive mental health physical health things like that um using local models like uh quin 3.6 or Gemma 4 uh would be a good idea you're talking about building a memory system so using something like Andre Carpathi's LM Wiki or Obsidian or uh Joplin or uh really any persistent storage system Serena MCP Open Viking anything that can index data and provide a knowledge graph there's a project I saw the other they call Light KG uh which is a lightweight knowledge graph it's intended for coding to help AI quickly find code that's relevant uh from its library but guess what that works just as well for pretty much any form of data so you could with that combination of items a knowledge graph um a local model and um and and tool handling have a very capable system that can process the store and process your data you then have to provide the data so think about the kinds of self improvement you're looking to do think about who does that kind of thing think about how they gather that information on input calls or input appointments when you go to see a therapist what are the what are the intake forms that you have to fill out when you go to see a doctor what are the the things you have to do in advance when you go to any professional what background knowledge do you have to provide? For example, you would you would never hire a building contractor to come in and make you know repairs or changes to a to your home to your building. If they're like, Oh, yeah, I don't need to come over and measure anything, I'll just do it. And you're like, No, you won't.

You're you know, you're fired. Uh compare that to somebody who comes in and measures and takes photos and maybe uses LIDEI scanners to get you know pixel perfect uh measurements of a space. That's somebody like, okay, this this person is clearly doing their homework and getting all the data in advance. That's what you want to do with AI. Have your AI tools of choice identify the kinds of intake paperwork that you would normally do with a human professional.

So if you were wanting it to help you learn better things, what would a learning coach ask you? They would say, you know, what are your goals? What are the what do you know about this topic already? What things do you need to unlearn? What are the things that uh concern you?

Uh and you would work with that learning coach to build a learning plan. But you got to provide all that data up front as much as you can, and then make sure that the system itself has really good guardrails about what it is and is not allowed to draw upon for sources. This is another thing that a lot of people do really wrong with AI. They have a tendency to say, like, oh, and you know, go search your s for some some improvement, you know, personal self-growth and self-improvement stuff, and they don't provide any guardrails on it. When you do that and say, I need some self improvement ideas and things, it will view, say, the American Psychiatry Association and Aunt Esther's healing crystal blog as equally credible.

And if you are not all in on either healing crystals or modern psychiatry, you might be unhappy with the results you get. So you have to specify in scoping your system and in scoping your inquiry what is and is not allowed. You might have very strongly held opinions about the you know certain types of things. You may say, like, hey, you know, I am AUADHD, and so CBT is not a valid uh way to help me with you know some of my self-proof goals because for my condition, the way I work, it doesn't fit, right? You might say something like that.

You have to tell AI these things. You cannot assume that it knows, you cannot assume that it will know what to do. And of course, I have to say this: anything that is dealing with you know medical, mental health, physical health, uh things along those lines, have a human expert fact-checking and validating and working with you to build the system. Do not go it alone. Um, if you can at all avoid it, do not go it alone because there is no AI system on the planet that is going to have those weird little nuances that make for a great therapist or a great doctor.

Yes, they can do a very credible job of executing existing procedures, right? You can hand an AI system the cognitive behavioral therapy manual from the Veterans Association, and it will do a great job of of working you through all those processes, but it does not know, and we'll never know that maybe it's inappropriate for you. Only you and your qualified practitioners can decide which approaches work, and then you can build systems around those. So please do not do stuff like that without a qualified professional assisting you. It's just it's gonna go very badly if you if you don't.

So those would be my suggestions. Start by gathering up all the data. Start by understanding what AI can and can't do, and start gathering up all the materials you're going to need to make that work for you. Thanks for the question. Talk to you on the next one.

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world's leading experts on AI and marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, particularly for uses of AI in marketing, AI and consulting, AI and management consulting, AI and business, AI strategy. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI from Marketers, An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an internationally renowned AI keynote speaker around the world.

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