Lesson 1.3 · Tier 1 — Prompting
Everything so far treated a conversation as one question with pushes. But the real leverage — the kind you’ll live in during Tier 2 — comes from long sessions: planning a project across an hour, refining a document across an afternoon. Long conversations have their own physics, and knowing three things about them puts you ahead of almost everyone.
Physics #1: Context accumulates — spend it
Within one chat, everything you’ve said stays on the table. Most people ignore this and re-explain from scratch each message, like meeting a stranger every time. Instead, build: “Using the audience we defined earlier, draft the opening.” “Apply the same tone rules from my email to this one.” Each early investment — pasting your writing sample, stating your constraints — pays dividends for the rest of the session. A well-fed hour-long chat produces work no single prompt could, because by minute forty it knows your project better than a new hire would.
Physics #2: Context rots — recognize the smell
The flip side: everything stays on the table, including your dead ends. Rejected that marketing angle twenty messages ago? Its ghost still haunts the room, and sometimes it creeps back into answers. The telltale signs of a rotting session: the model resurrects ideas you killed, mixes up two versions of your draft, or keeps drifting back to a framing you abandoned. Two remedies, in order of severity — the course-correct: “Stop. Forget the discount angle entirely; from here on, only the quality story.” Firm, explicit, works most of the time. And when the haunting persists: evacuate.
Physics #3: The graceful evacuation
The move that makes fresh starts free instead of expensive — before leaving a long chat, ask:
“Summarize this conversation as a briefing for a fresh start: the goal, every decision we’ve made, my constraints and preferences, and what’s still open. Write it so a new assistant could continue seamlessly.”
Copy the briefing, open a clean chat, paste it as message one. Sixty seconds, and you’ve kept the decisions while leaving the ghosts behind. This same move solves the “continue tomorrow” problem, the “switching tools” problem, and — later in your path — the “handing context to a teammate” problem. Of everything in Tier 1, this is the prompt people thank us for.
When to evacuate versus correct? Rough guide: switching topics entirely → new chat, no briefing needed. Same project, session gone muddy → carry-over. Mid-task and it misread one thing → course-correct and continue. You’ll develop the instinct within a week of long sessions.
Open your longest existing chat and run the carry-over on it — read the briefing it produces and marvel at how much context you’d silently built. Then save the carry-over as library entry #4. It’s the one you’ll use forever.
Next: the two modes people keep mixing up — and pay for in mediocrity.Lesson 1.4 — Thinking vs. Producing →