Prompt Engineering: ChatGPT & AI Prompts For Work Success!

In this lesson, Steve introduces the powerful and versatile persona pattern—a core prompting technique that transforms AI into a domain-specific expert. By asking ChatGPT to "act as" a particular persona (like a marketing manager, IT professional, or even a fictional or inanimate character), you can generate more targeted, expert-level responses. Steve walks through how to structure persona prompts using real-world examples, such as creating a complete marketing plan for a new product. You'll also see how to continue refining results by staying in conversation with the persona and adding constraints like budget or audience focus. This is one of the most useful and creative ways to boost your prompt engineering skills.

In this lesson, Steve introduces the flipped interaction pattern—a powerful prompting technique where you let the AI ask you questions instead of the other way around. This is especially useful when you’re unsure how to begin, need to brainstorm, want to reflect deeply, or are preparing for things like job interviews, exams, or big decisions. Steve walks through how to structure flipped prompts, including how to set the goal, context, and flow. You’ll see a hands-on example of using ChatGPT as a mock interviewer for an entry-level accounting job, and learn how this technique can be used for personal growth, project planning, hiring, or exploring life choices. Flip the script—and uncover new insights through guided questioning.

In this lesson, Steve introduces the powerful Cognitive Verifier Pattern—a technique that uses AI to generate and answer a series of sub-questions in order to arrive at a better, more accurate solution. You’ll see a real-world example focused on selecting the best social media advertising platform for an online course business. Instead of getting a generic answer, Steve shows how breaking the prompt into smaller questions leads to a highly relevant recommendation (YouTube, in this case). You’ll learn how to structure your own prompts to guide ChatGPT through multi-step reasoning, resulting in deeper insights and more tailored responses. This technique is especially useful for decision-making, strategy development, and personalized planning.

In this lesson, Steve walks you through the Question Refinement Pattern, a practical two-step technique to help you ask clearer, more effective questions using ChatGPT. By prompting the model to refine your original question into a sharper, more actionable version, you can dramatically improve the quality of the answers you receive. Whether you're making business decisions (like hiring an assistant) or investment choices (such as evaluating Tesla stock), refining your questions helps uncover deeper insights tailored to your goals and risk tolerance. You’ll learn how to implement this pattern using a simple setup phrase, see real examples in action, and understand how this method enhances both the relevance and accuracy of AI responses.

In this lesson, Steve introduces the powerful Audience Persona Pattern—a simple yet highly effective way to improve your ChatGPT results by specifying who the response should be written for. Whether you want explanations geared toward a 10-year-old child, a medical student, a small business owner, or a legal expert, this method helps the AI adjust tone, vocabulary, and detail level to fit your target audience. You'll see how the same question can produce vastly different responses depending on the persona used, and how this pattern can help you better understand complex topics, communicate more clearly, or prepare content for specific audiences. Perfect for presentations, learning, and clearer communication.

In this lesson, Steve introduces one of the most commonly used—and often unconscious—prompting templates: the Task–Action–Object (TAO) pattern. This practical structure helps you create clearer and more effective prompts by breaking them into three parts: the task (what you want to do), the action (how you want it done), and the object (what it should be done to). Steve walks through a hands-on example of summarizing a lengthy article using this template, showing how the TAO format turns even dense or boring content into quick, scannable insights. Once you understand TAO, you'll recognize how versatile and useful it is in both your personal and professional use of AI tools like ChatGPT.

In this lesson, Steve explores the Attribute–Object–Action (AOA) prompting framework—a powerful method for generating insightful, structured responses from ChatGPT. This technique helps you describe or evaluate something (like a product, experience, or idea) by breaking it down into its key attributes, the object being examined, and the actions or outcomes associated with each attribute. You’ll see this in action through real-world examples, from assessing project management software to describing the perfect romantic restaurant. Steve demonstrates how AOA can improve prompt clarity, surface richer detail, and guide more strategic decision-making in both business and personal contexts.

In this lesson, Steve introduces the DAO (Description–Attribute–Object) prompting framework—an effective tool for getting ChatGPT to describe key qualities of any subject. You’ll learn how to structure prompts that clearly define what you want described (the description), the object of focus (like a website), and the specific attributes you're interested in (such as visual appeal or user experience). Through practical examples—like designing a website for children's journals—Steve shows how this framework can guide AI responses with greater precision and help you explore deeper details such as design choices, colors, or usability. Perfect for anyone working on product, marketing, or user experience ideas.

In this quick and practical lesson, Steve walks you through two of the most common and easy-to-use prompt structures: the Question-Answer template and the List Item template. You’ll learn how to frame effective questions to get focused, useful responses from ChatGPT—and how to generate well-organized lists with added detail. Whether you’re looking for quick explanations or feature-benefit breakdowns (like when evaluating software or brainstorming ideas), these templates help you get clear, structured output fast. Ideal for beginners and experienced users alike, these tools will instantly improve how you interact with AI.

In this lesson, you'll explore how to use the Design Template Pattern to unleash creativity and generate detailed design concepts, ideas, and strategic plans using ChatGPT. Steve demonstrates how starting with a broad or highly specific prompt can lead to useful outputs for things like webpage designs, logos, branding elements, or even brainstorming business strategies. By structuring your input with clear creative direction—or letting the AI improvise—you can receive inspiration, refine your concepts, and accelerate your design thinking. Whether you're building a website, developing marketing assets, or launching a product, this pattern is a powerful tool for rapid ideation and smart planning.

This lesson explores how to use the Writing Template Pattern to generate written content quickly and effectively with AI. Whether you're crafting blog posts, reports, articles, emails, or entire books, ChatGPT can serve as your co-writer—helping with ideation, structure, tone, and even SEO. Steve walks through examples like writing a blog post about leadership, creating report outlines, generating titles and keywords, and refining sections based on specific goals or audiences. You'll see how to use AI for drafting, revising, and expanding your content while maintaining ethical authorship and personal voice. This pattern is especially helpful for saving time and overcoming writer’s block.

In this lesson, you'll explore two powerful ways to use ChatGPT for translation: traditional and creative. First, Steve demonstrates how to easily convert content from one language to another with just a simple prompt—perfect for translating emails, articles, or documents while preserving meaning and tone. Then, he takes it further with creative translation, where the original message is repurposed into new formats like blog posts, social media content, or video scripts. You'll see how to adapt a professional email into engaging Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram posts, and even a YouTube video script—all while keeping the core message intact. Ideal for marketers, content creators, and communicators, this lesson shows how to make your content multilingual and multimedia-friendly.

In this engaging lesson, Steve shows you how to use ChatGPT to create compelling storylines—whether you're marketing a product, writing a children’s book, or simply adding narrative flair to your message. You'll see how AI can quickly generate draft story structures, characters, challenges, and resolutions to suit your personal or professional needs. From crafting a promotional video story for a personal finance app to imagining the adventures of a young beaver building his first den, this lesson highlights how to spark creativity, adapt narratives, and shape messages that connect with your audience. Perfect for marketers, writers, educators, and creators of all kinds.

Need help solving a problem, creating a process, or just figuring out what to do next? This lesson introduces the How-To Prompt, also known as the Step-by-Step Template—perfect for breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps. Whether you’re planning an office party or building a pitch deck for venture capitalists, this template guides the AI to deliver clear, ordered instructions to help you move forward with confidence. Steve shows you how to write simple but powerful prompts that generate practical, actionable sequences—so you never feel stuck again.

In this practical lesson, Steve demonstrates how to use ChatGPT to summarize long articles, white papers, and dense reports into clear, concise summaries. Whether you're trying to stay current in your industry, save time at work, or quickly grasp key points without reading pages of content, this technique will help. You’ll learn simple prompts like “Summarize this article” or “Give me the key points,” and see how AI can highlight essential takeaways and perspectives—making heavy reading lighter and more actionable. Ideal for professionals, researchers, and lifelong learners.

In this fun and inspiring lesson, you’ll learn how to tap into the creative power of ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas, generate fresh concepts, and explore imaginative solutions. Whether you're naming a new company, designing a logo, crafting taglines, or choosing brand colors, AI can act like your personal creative partner—offering suggestions, refining ideas, and sparking insights. Steve demonstrates how simple prompts like “Create,” “Brainstorm,” and “Give me more ideas” can lead to powerful results across business, branding, product design, and more. You'll leave this lesson with practical techniques to turn AI into your own virtual muse.

In this practical, hands-on lesson, you’ll discover how ChatGPT can support coding, debugging, and other technical tasks like working with Excel formulas or scripts. Steve shows you how to use simple prompts to generate functional code snippets, translate code between languages like JavaScript and Python, and even debug faulty code. You’ll also learn how to prompt ChatGPT effectively for specific programming challenges or workflow improvements. Whether you're a developer, data analyst, or someone who works with technical tools, this lesson will give you real-world examples of how AI can save you time, reduce frustration, and help you solve problems faster.

In this lesson, you'll explore the powerful Chain of Thought prompting technique, where a single question evolves into a full, dynamic interaction. Steve shows how to guide ChatGPT step by step—building ideas, refining outputs, and deepening the conversation to co-create complex deliverables like onboarding videos, blog content, or immersive descriptions. This method turns ChatGPT into a true thinking partner, helping you brainstorm, develop, and iterate in real time. Whether you're solving business problems, crafting creative stories, or producing professional content, this technique unlocks deeper results through purposeful dialogue.

In this insightful lesson, you’ll explore ReAct prompting—a powerful technique that helps ChatGPT break down complex tasks by explaining its reasoning and showing its actions step by step. Steve walks you through how to create prompts that reveal why the AI is generating specific responses and what it’s doing at each step, using examples like writing persuasive marketing copy for a kayak. You’ll learn how to use ReAct prompting to get clearer, more logical outputs, understand the AI’s decision-making process, and refine responses more effectively. This technique is especially useful for problem-solving, copywriting, and improving transparency in AI-generated content.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use Zero-Shot Prompting, a technique where ChatGPT generates a response without any prior examples or fine-tuning on your specific topic. Steve illustrates how this approach leverages the model’s general knowledge to respond creatively and helpfully—even when the prompt includes something entirely made up, like a pink panda. You’ll see how zero-shot prompting works in real-world use cases, like writing a Facebook ad for a zoo, and why it’s especially valuable when you're exploring new ideas, experimenting with unfamiliar subjects, or working with novel concepts.

In this creative and insightful lesson, you’ll explore Few-Shot Prompting—a powerful technique that helps you get more accurate and customized results from ChatGPT by providing a few examples or extra context. Steve walks you through the difference between zero-shot and few-shot prompting using a playful “pink panda” example, where the AI invents responses based on imaginative terms like fuggle and radda. You'll learn how even a small amount of added information can dramatically improve ChatGPT’s understanding and output. This lesson is especially useful when working with internal jargon, niche topics, or any situation where clarity and consistency are essential.

In this quick lesson, you’ll get a side-by-side breakdown of zero-shot and few-shot prompting, two essential techniques for working effectively with ChatGPT. Steve explains how zero-shot prompting relies solely on general AI knowledge—making it fast and flexible but sometimes unpredictable—while few-shot prompting provides targeted context or examples to guide responses with greater accuracy. You’ll learn when to use each method, how to shift from one to the other during a conversation, and how this subtle shift can dramatically improve results. Ideal for anyone who wants to level up their prompting skills with simple but powerful adjustments.

In this visually engaging lesson, you'll discover how to use multimodal prompting, a technique that allows you to combine different types of input—such as text and images—to get more context-rich, insightful responses from AI. Steve demonstrates how uploading an image of kayakers and pairing it with a simple text prompt can produce a vivid, emotionally resonant description. You'll learn how this method is especially helpful for generating marketing copy, writing product descriptions, or telling visual stories. This lesson is ideal for anyone who wants to make their prompts more powerful by tapping into AI's ability to understand and respond to multiple types of media.

In this fun and eye-opening lesson, you’ll learn how to use AI-powered text-to-image tools—like DALL·E, Bing Image Creator, Midjourney, and more—to generate high-quality visuals from simple text prompts. Steve demonstrates how to create everything from whimsical blue monsters to professional training images, simply by writing effective prompts. Whether you're aiming for 3D realism, digital art, or the brush strokes of Van Gogh, you'll see how tweaking your wording can drastically change the results. This lesson is perfect for content creators, marketers, educators, and anyone who wants to generate compelling visuals without being a designer or illustrator.

In this hands-on lesson, you'll explore how to write effective prompts for generating images using AI tools like DALL·E, Bing Image Creator, and others. Steve walks you through five essential best practices: being clear and concise, adding specific details, setting the desired mood, choosing an artistic style, and experimenting freely. You’ll learn how small changes in wording—like saying “a peaceful forest scene with a gentle breeze” instead of just “forest”—can produce drastically different results. From crafting surreal landscapes to professional images for social media, you'll see how to turn your ideas into visuals. This lesson also includes bonus tips and real-world examples, like creating custom 3D basketball court graphics for promotional use.

In this practical lesson, you'll step into a real example of creating images using text-to-image prompting with AI tools like DALL·E. Steve demonstrates how easy and fun it is to generate visual content by entering clear, descriptive prompts—and then adjusting those prompts to get the look you want. You’ll learn how to:

• Use prompt elements like color, background, style, and object count to fine-tune your results.

• Choose and adjust artistic styles (3D, photographic, Impressionist, etc.).

• Avoid unwanted elements (e.g., extra objects or people).

• Iterate with small changes to improve your image results.

• Use inspiration from public prompt libraries and communities (like Discord or image galleries).

Whether you're designing for fun, marketing, or business needs (like showcasing a product such as a kayak), this lesson shows how accessible it is to create custom visuals—even if you’re not an artist.

While AI and prompt engineering offer powerful tools for creativity and productivity, they also come with important challenges and ethical considerations. In this lesson, you’ll explore some of the most common limitations—including bias in training data, difficulty with complex instructions, contextual misunderstandings, and overdependence on pretraining. Steve also covers ethical risks such as misinformation, offensive content generation, privacy concerns, and accountability issues when AI-generated content is used inappropriately. This is a thoughtful look at the responsibility we carry when using AI tools, and how we can navigate these challenges while staying ethical and effective.

One of the most important limitations of using AI tools like ChatGPT is something called “hallucinations.” This is the technical term for when an AI confidently gives you an answer that’s completely wrong or made up. In this lesson, Steve explores real-world examples of AI hallucinations—like incorrect stock data pulled into a table or made-up details about a public bio—and explains why this happens, especially as AI systems blend large language models with real-time search. You’ll learn why it’s crucial to double-check AI outputs, especially for factual accuracy, and how to use AI as an assistant—not a replacement—for your knowledge and judgment. This lesson reinforces why critical thinking and subject matter familiarity are essential when working with AI.

Prompt engineering is emerging both as a full-time profession and a vital skill for anyone using AI tools. In this lesson, Steve explains what a prompt engineer is, what they actually do—from designing and experimenting with prompts to collaborating across teams—and how prompt engineers are becoming highly valued across industries. But you don’t need to be a full-time prompt engineer to benefit: anyone who interacts with AI is, in a way, a prompt engineer. Think of prompting as a new digital language—stronger prompt skills lead to better results, whether you're writing, researching, coding, or creating. This lesson gives you a clear view of how prompt engineering works as a job and a practical, everyday superpower.

In this final lesson, Steve congratulates you on completing the course and outlines four practical action steps to help you apply what you've learned. You’ll be encouraged to review key lessons, experiment with ChatGPT, reflect on where it can make the biggest impact in your life, and continue your learning journey.