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The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
Ep 95 - My Three Words For 2026
00:19:04
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Wayfair Every style, Every home hey, it's Cary. This episode I'm going to share with you my three words for 2026 what they mean to me and how I'm going to use tools like ChatGPT to make the most of them in the coming year for my personal and professional work. That sounds interesting to you? Then stick around and I'll see you on the other side of the music. Welcome to the ChatGPT experiment. This is the podcast designed to help you better understand tools like ChatGPT and help you get a nugget to be effective using it in your personal or professional life. My name is Kerry Weston. I am your host. I'm glad you're here. Happy New Year. How you doing? How was the holiday season? Did you make it through safe? Did you get everything you wanted for the holidays? I know what we got a big old cold wave, ice and snow and the snowblower got used up. Here in Maine we went from green grass to icy skate rinks on the driveway. Seems like overnight but got through it. Everybody's happy and healthy. Took some breaks. Good to be back and giving some thoughts today as to what's going to happen in 2026 or more importantly, what am I going to make sure happens in 2026 for me. So this is the. I won't call it the resolution. This is the planning. This is the structure episode. And I thought what I would do is instead of trying to get into how to do something or here's a task and a prompt. I just want to share with you what I go through at the end of the year, beginning of the year. That helps me get my framing in mind, helps me get some purpose and then how I'm working chatgpt into it now, to be fair, as I look at my computer screen, I am running ChatGPT. I'm also running Claude and I've been testing Gemini for various things and I do have a way of bouncing back and forth. I've found that competition is good. You do something in one and then bring it over and, and see if the other can enhance it. And I again, I'm learning that others are, are better for things than chatgpt and vice versa. But that's what I'm doing. But how I'm prepping for the coming year. At the end of the year what I do is I sit down, I have three words that I put together. I put some thought into it. In fact, this came from a friend of mine, Chris Rogan. I've kind of borrowed it from him. He's been doing it for a decade or so. And every year there's three words that kind of guide your focus, your insight, your work, your purpose. Last year for me, my three words were connect, routine and smile. And just to give you the background on that, connect is I wanted to make purposeful reach out and communications with people. Just because a little background. I was coming off owning a business for 25 years, I sold my share of the business and I was entering into a new phase where I wasn't going to be socializing as much, I wasn't going to be out and about, I wasn't going to be meeting and working around people. In fact, just the opposite. I moved to a single desk in my house. So I wasn't part of the water cooler connection, client meeting world. And so I wanted to make sure that I was connecting with people on purpose as well as personally. Right. Social connections. I wanted to expand my social connections without reason, just to connect. That was number one. Number two is routine. I wanted to find systems that could help me be more consistent and efficient. Routine. So that was a work focused one and then three. My third word was smile. I wanted just to be fair, I wanted to be less grumpy. I wanted to find more reasons and opportunities to smile. And as I go through, I gave myself grades and I think on connection I was probably in the B C plus B. I started strong, but as the year gets busier, the summer gets busier and you start traveling in the fall. I think I toned off there a little bit. So I'd say C plus B routine. I think same thing. First half of the year I think I was great. Then I started getting into August or whatnot. I start to lose it a little bit. I look at the journals I kept, I look at some of the habits I have. It certainly was a tale of two halves of the year, for sure. But I think I did pretty good on smile. I relaxed a little bit more. I let some stuff go from a kind of personal approach. I think 2025 was a really good one. I think it was lightning on the shoulders or lighting, getting lighter on the shoulders. I think I was able to exhale and pay more attention to the moment and the people that are around me. I'm going to give myself an A for smile. I think, to be honest with you, that's probably the most important one. I think that is the. That's the one that if I was going to excel, that's the one. So I'm. I'm proud of that one. So I come into 2026 and I have three words for my focus this year. My focus number one is going to be framework. This is about me getting my. My thinking, my principles, my stories, my experiences into reusable, let's call it structures, maybe resources or assets. This is a work. This is a work goal. I have a lot of frameworks and principles and things that I go to over and over again, but I don't really have a resource of them. I don't have a library of those resources, in other words, that I can pull out quickly to share and explain without being in the room. And that's kind of what they say. The shoemaker's kid goes barefoot. That is something that I need to focus on so I can be more scalable quicker with a lot of the philosophies and things that I employ in my business. So framework is number one. Make is my number two word. Make. I am. This is a personal one. This is me. I want to get into creating things. I want to. There's two things specifically. I got back into some craft wood burning and some woodcrafts over vacation. And I want to do more of that. I want to use my hands and I want to create something. But I'll. The other side, I have. I'd say three go to recipes when it's time for me to cook, when I need to cook for groups, and when I need to cook for the family and have people over, I have three go to recipes. And this year it's me expanding that to maybe five or six because I've leaned on those three, right? I've leaned on those three a little too long. So I want to make food as well as make A hobby. Right. I want to build that. I don't know what that's going to be yet, but I. But I want to get there. And then the third is study. This one is about depth. It's kind of like be going beyond surface curiosity and I certainly do that here, right. With chat, GPT and that kind of thing. I've been doing that for a while, but I want to find a couple other things to dig deeper in on and explore and study and really get kind of knowledgeable on the things that are interesting to me. I think I am a jack of many trades, but I want to go deeper in a couple more. So that's my curiosity. Feeling that. What are yours? What's your routine in the beginning of the year, end of the year? Are you like me? Do you, do you start? I won't even say I started strong because literally it looked like right around the six or seven month mark my routine started to change. And there's two things in Maine I say you can't compete with from a business point of view, and that's sunshine and Santa Claus. And I think once the sunshine came out, my routine changed, you know, and I can physically see that in my attention to detail and journaling and tracking and that kind of thing, so. And then of course with the holiday season, things go awry anyway. So sunshine and Santa Claus certainly do put a strain on routines and purposes and focuses and whatnot. But how are you? How are you? Do you stick with it? Do you have you just abandoned doing it altogether? So I don't call these resolutions, as you can see. These are more of things that I want to focus on and do. It's not giving up something and then hoping that I can do it. It's basically purpose behind the days that we have. And of course, the smile and the routine and the focuses from last year don't go away, you just build upon them. Right. And why am I telling you this on this podcast? Well, number one, I think just kind of expressing who I am and what I do is an important part of connecting with you. And you share an awful lot with me and, and I give it back to you. But I've actually gotten into the tools here to help me explore how to do these three words. So these words are mine, the intent is mine, the goals are mine. But now I need some help, right? And I've shared with you many times that ChatGPT specifically is my intern. This is my amazing intern. It's my employee, it's my strategy advisor. It's My accountability partner. And so as I enter the New Year Framework, for instance, is one way in which I'll use Chad or Claude or whatever as part of my framework is documenting what's between my ears, right? I call it oral history. But there are many stories, there are many philosophies, many frameworks, many principles that I engage in and use on a regular basis that are instinctual to me, but I don't have them documented, like I said. So one of the things that I started to do is with this microphone and literally having a conversation like this, just not with you, but with ChatGPT, is just start talking and getting these frameworks out and those frameworks are going to turn into transcripts. You know, these conversations are going to turn into transcripts. And then once I have the transcripts, I can start to build articles and resources and that go along with it, right? So the first thing is just to get it out of your head, right? And so I'm using Chat GPT for that. And when I have time, I am just grabbing a principle or story or a mission or framework, whatever it might be, and just talking. And then once I get it out, obviously I can do many things. So that's one way in which the framework word is being benefited by the use of ChatGPT and others. And the talking is helpful because just like I'm doing now, I don't have to think with my fingers. And if you look back in the archives, if, if you're interested in that, the ability to set up your computer to talk to ChatGPT is one of the episodes that I, that I have. But also chatgpt in and of itself has a, has an audio mode, right? And so I, as I've said before, I talk much better than I type in terms of thoroughness and detail and pace. So that helps with make this is interesting. I spent some time, we bought a lake house right around Thanksgiving. And one of the things I wanted to do was create a cribbage table. So I found an old end table on Facebook marketplace for 20 bucks. Had to be real wood. That was my only, that was my only attribute that I was looking for. So real wood and stripped it down, sanded it and stripped it and whatnot and got a wood burning kit. It's been a long time since I've touched one. Used some tracing paper and I put an image of our lake that the house is on. I did that on top of the, on top of the board, traced it with a wood burning kit or with pencil and then Used the wood burning kit to fill it in. And then I did the same with a cribbage pattern. So I put cribbage holes around the lake on top of the table and then drill those holes and then did some stenciling and writing and whatnot. And then of course got into staining and varnishing and all that. And I used ChatGPT for a lot of it. Surprisingly, I was asking questions along the way and it was surprisingly helpful. It was like having a woodcraft, you know, partner right there next to me. That was good. And so I'm going to do the same thing with my goals here in 2026 is I'm going to, I'm going to ask how do I find whatever it's going to be the recipes, I'm going to tell about, the things that I like to eat, I'm going to tell about things the family likes to eat, the things I'm doing now, what interests me. And we'll get into, we'll get into building that recipe library and I'll also get into the crafts. I'll keep going, but it's going to be, I'm building a conversation specifically around that hobby so I can turn to it over and over again. Right. And then of course, study is, you know, this is one of the untapped. I really think this is one of the untapped uses of chat GPT and many people that I talk to, which is the ability for chat to teach us something. And when I say teach us something, not looking it up like a Google search and not using it like an encyclopedia, but the ability of saying, I want to learn more about this. Let's create a curriculum, let's create a pattern, let's create an outline. Teach it to me like I'm an 8th grader. This is why I'm interested in it. These are the things I want to get out of it. Let's go deeper and kind of build your own course. This is like your own personal master level course of whatever you're interested in. Right. And I haven't picked it yet. I know that because I just shared it with you and I wrote it down and I'm committed to it. That study is one of my three words. But I don't know what I'm going to be studying yet. And I probably will use ChatGPT to brainstorm the things that I'm interested in learning more about. And then you can bet that I will turn to the tool when I'm ready to start to build out some Personal training and education. And one of the things that I think is important, and I mentioned to you that 2025, you know, staying connected with others for just the simple sake of doing it is important. I think that when we get into learning and when you get into these goals, having that leave the computer, having that leave the phone, and having that leave the desk that we're at, and getting into the real world. So part of my study, one of my goals that I'm committed to here as I learn a new topic and go deeper in it, is it has to be beyond the desktop, it has to be beyond digital. I have to get into the real world. So part of my outline, part of my goal is to have it be 3D, meaning I will have to go have experiences, if you will. So I'm going to hold myself accountable to that. It's not about reading more and it's not about studying more. It's about taking that and really injecting yourself into the real world and using that knowledge.
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Right?
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So those are my three words. And that's how I see myself utilizing some of these digital tools to have real world human experiences for the sake of being better and improving in different areas. It has, it's been interesting as I've been brainstorming, I'll be honest with you, because I have been really fascinated by the memory, the expansion of memory in both ChatGPT and Claude to kind of say, hey, do you remember what we talked about on this topic? It might have been six months ago, right? Or it might have been, you know, tell me three things that we've had conversations on so that I can build from there. In fact, it was my revisiting of the three words in 2025, using ChatGPT and revisiting where I've been and using the accountability partner that I built in ChatGPT to kind of go back and do that check in that led me to help brainstorm what I want to do for 2026. So there are some real concrete benefits in the real world from using ChatGPT on a regular basis because it remembers a lot and it can help shape your, I don't know, goals, maybe, or at least perspective, because it's remembering things from an objective point of view and then it can give it back to you. It can give it back to you whenever you need it. So that's where I'm going in 2026 and the ChatGPT will be a part of it. But again, having conversations with real folks, right? Getting out and meeting more people and doing more work and, and having collisions, especially when you are self employed again as I am, it can be kind of an echo chamber here. And so the ability of getting through that and just rubbing elbows with others. Right. And sometimes in an unstructured way and sometimes in meaningful ways important. So that's, that's where I'm going. I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear what your plans are for 2026. How you're tackling it though you know, what you're tackling, how you're tackling it. Also, I will share that the hundredth episode is coming up. I didn't know I'd ever be at 100 when I started one. If there's anything that you have for a topic or anything that you think would be interesting, love to hear it for the hundredth. So I'm kind of getting a few things together here and if there's somebody you want to hear from or something you want to talk about, shoot me a note. ChatGPT experiment.com is the episodes website. You can get a hold of me there. There's also some episode archives and articles and I do do trainings for those that are new to the podcast. Welcome. I do do group trainings. I do individual trainings, keynotes and workshops. You can find all that@chatgptexperiment.com okay, 2026 is here. Hope you're, hope you're warm and well wherever you find yourself. And thank you for listening. It's going to be an amazing year and I'm glad you're here to be a part of it. Okay, so that does it for this episode. As I always say, the best way to get any value from tool like chat your own curiosity. And the whole purpose of this podcast is to increase your confidence to be curious. So until we talk again, until the next episode, do stay curious. Okay, we'll talk soon. Bye Bye.
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