Hi. I trust you and yours are well.

Thank you always for reading my books and free bi-monthly broadcasts, and using my tools and strategies for winning in a VUCA world with freedom, power and peace of mind.*

*You probably know by now: VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Perhaps you also know the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times ๐Ÿ˜‰

A confession (please donโ€™t tell my family): I was playing Wordle, the game Tim Wardle developed and then sold to the New York Times, where you have to guess a 5-letter word. You have 6 guesses, then you lose. And I did not find the word. So after 5 failed guesses, I caved and asked ChatGPT.

But ChatGPT was not as smart as I thought it was.

The machine, developed by OpenAI, took the world by storm in early 2023. And it does amazing things for me. For example, I had told it to write a course outline based on my book Communicate or Die,ย and it did an excellent job. And itโ€™s helping us create an online self-assessment, complete with diagnostics and recommendations, for my online leadership courseย PowerCatalyst

But now I wanted it to help me with a Wordle game. If you donโ€™t know Wordle, you may want to try it, itโ€™s very cool, and free.ย https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

In fact, my family and I play Wordle every day, each of us separately. Wordle has become a kind of addiction. So perhaps the fact that you can play it only once a day is a blessing in disguise.

The idea is that you have 6 tries to guess a 5-letter word. And a little like MasterMind, which I played as a teen in the 1970s, you get feedback: a green tile for the correct letter in the correct place, and a yellow letter for the correct letter in the wrong place.

One day I was stuck. For the life of me, I could not come up with a workable word.

So in a moment of weakness, I turned to ChatGPT. I thought AI must be able to help me. I gave it a simple command: โ€œplease list all English 5-letter words where the 2nd letter is E, the 3rd letter is V, the 4th letter is E.

ChatGPT gave me a whole bunch of words like LOVER or RIVER, which were obviously wrong. I kept saying, โ€œThank you, but you are wrong.โ€ And ChatGPT kept apologizing, only to provide more wrong words.

What do we learn from this? ChatGPT is an amazing tool, but you should treat it like a really eager intern. It will produce a lot of good stuff, along with some incredibly stupid mistakes.

And just in case AI ever takes control of humanity, I want to be nice to ChatGPT. Iโ€™d like to make clear that I am grateful to ChatGPT, I think ChatGPT is super cool, I love ChatGPT.

To learn more about effective speaking, check out my book Communicate or Die. ย 

What do you think?ย  I look forward to reading you.ย 

Best,

Thomas

For additional questions or to schedule a call to learn how you can leverage the power of effective communication to maximize potential and impact for you and your team, please email coach@maximizeu.life


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