Turn AI Into Your Personal Strategic Advisor (Starting with Your Career Ikigai)
Inside this issue:
- ✨ Problem: Why most people get generic advice from AI (and how to fix it)
- 🧠 Framework: My 4-step formula to turn AI into your personal strategic advisor
- 🎯 Example: Using this method to find your career Ikigai
I was sitting in my favorite Bangkok restaurant, about to order Tom Yum soup, when everything changed.
The young waitress had just taken my order when she suddenly turned around with this strange smile I’ll never forget: "I think it’s an earthquake."
Within seconds, everyone was running outside.
My girlfriend and I found ourselves in a packed café hours later – she’d run out barefoot, we couldn’t return to our 30th-floor apartment for days, and nobody knew what was happening next.
In that moment, everything else vanished. My daily todos, my six-month plans, my worries about work – none of it mattered. There was only one question:
What do we do in the next 15 minutes?
Moments like that strip away everything non-essential and put you in emergency mode. Your systems break down. Your frameworks get stress-tested.
These are exactly the moments when you need help thinking clearly.
When You Need a Thought Partner Most
In high-pressure situations, we instinctively turn to the people who know us best – family, friends, mentors. These are the people who understand our values and can help us think clearly when our minds are racing.
But we now have another ally: AI as a thought partner.
I’m not suggesting AI should replace human connection. But it can absolutely enhance our decision-making, especially when we need to think through complex choices.
The earthquake taught me something important: we’re not always in perfect conditions when we need to make big decisions.
But we can have frameworks and systems ready to help us, even under pressure.
Beyond Generic AI Advice
Most people make the same mistake with AI: they ask generic questions without context and get generic answers.
From my experience, there are two main ingredients to getting great answers:
Context + Frameworks.
Context is everything. Think about it – you don’t get generic advice from your close friends, right? That’s because they know your story. They understand your personality, history; they know what makes you tick.
Frameworks give you depth. Why do we read books? Because someone spent years, sometimes decades, developing insights and systems that actually work. Books are condensed wisdom – the distilled lessons from people who’ve solved the exact problems you’re facing.
AI can combine both – personal understanding plus proven frameworks – but only if you give it deliberately.
My 4-Step Formula for AI Thought Partnership
After experimenting with this approach for a long time, here’s the formula that I’m using right now:
Context 🧬 + AI Persona 👔 + Taste/Flavor 🌶️ + Different Approaches 🎛️ = Tailored Advice 🎯
Let me break this down:
Step 1: Codify Your Specific Context 🧬
Gather the knowledge that’s unique to your situation. This might include your values, goals, constraints, past experiences, or current circumstances. The more specific, the better.
Step 2: Create the Right AI Persona 👔
Choose who the AI needs to become to help you effectively. Should it be a career counselor? A time management coach? Be specific about the role you want it to play.
Step 3: Add Your Taste/Flavor 🌶️
Choose the frameworks, books, or ways of thinking that will guide the AI’s approach. This could be methodologies you believe in, mental models from thought leaders you admire, or principles from books that resonate with you.
Step 4: Use Different Approaches 🎛️
Don’t just ask one question. Try different prompts, different angles, different perspectives. This gives you a more complete picture and helps you think through all aspects of your situation.
Get more thoughtful ideas
Setting Up Your Environment
Here’s how to get this working:
- Use Projects (whether you use Claude or ChatGPT).
- Add resources from Step 1 and Step 3 as your Knowledge Base (you can upload them as PDFs).
- Now everything is ready for you to start experimenting with different approaches.
A Complete Example: Finding Your Ikigai and Your Next Career Move
Let me show you how you can use this for something many of us struggle with: figuring out our next career move. As a flavor, we will use the Japanese concept of Ikigai.
Step 1: Codify Your Career Context
Start by gathering these elements:
- Your current skills, strengths, and natural talents
- Past work experiences—what energized you versus what drained you
- Your values and what matters most to you in work and life
- Financial requirements and constraints
- Personal circumstances (family, location, lifestyle needs)
- Your long-term vision for the impact you want to make
Step 2: Create Your AI Career Persona
Try this prompt:
"Act as an experienced career strategist who specializes in helping people discover their Ikigai – the intersection of what they love, what they’re good at, what the world needs, and what they can be paid for. Your approach should be thoughtful, ask probing questions, and help me explore connections I might not see."
Step 3: Add Your Ikigai Flavor
Give the AI one of these frameworks to work with:
- "Ikigai" book by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles
- “The Magic of Thinking Big” book by David J. Schwartz
- "The Design Thinking Life Playbook" book by Michael Lewrick, Jean-Paul Thommen and Larry Leifer
- "Designing Your Life" book by Burnett & Evans
- Cal Newport’s "So Good They Can’t Ignore You" philosophy
- Simon Sinek’s "Start With Why" philosophy
- Any other career philosophy that resonates with you
Step 4: Use Different Ikigai Approaches
You can use this approach:
Right now I’m [add your specific career situation context here]. Knowing what you know about me from [name resources from Step 1], use frameworks from [name resource from Step 3] in order to help me. This is my challenge:
- "Help me identify what I truly love doing in work"
- "What skills do I have that the world genuinely needs?"
- "How can I bridge the gap between passion and market demand?"
- "What would my ideal workday look like five years from now?"
- "What career paths align with both my values and financial needs?"
This way, the AI becomes your personal Ikigai coach, using the frameworks you believe in to help you discover that sweet spot where passion, mission, profession, and vocation intersect.
That’s a wrap
The beauty of this method is that it gives you the thoughtful guidance of a trusted advisor, available 24/7 and tailored to your specific context.
Whether you’re facing a career transition, a major life decision, or even an unexpected crisis, having this framework ready can help you think more clearly when clarity matters most.
Try the Ikigai approach and let me know how it goes. I read every reply.
Until next time,
Matt
Originally published on Substack 👉 https://readwhitespace.substack.com/p/ai-as-your-thought-partner-4-step
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