I use ChatGPT 50 to 70 times a day for everything from preparing for professional meetings to getting super glue off my fingers
- Conor Grennan is Dean of MBA Students at the NYU Stern School of Business.
- He uses ChatGPT often to do things like synthesizing emails and researching professional networks.
This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Conor Grennan, who oversees various aspects of graduate student life at the NYU Stern School of Business. It has been edited for length and clarity.
ChatGPT is the most perfect brainstorming partner of all time, yet people stop at the gate.
If you want to write a business plan, that's going to take you a week — it's a lot of brainstorming, talking to a lot of people, and market research. ChatGPT will do it in 30 minutes, but you have to give it that 30 minutes.
I subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. It's faster, you have access to the latest updates, and there's never any problem getting on. And I use ChatGPT 50 to 70 times a day. So the notion of paying $20 a month for it is laughably low for the amount of value I get out of it.
I post often on LinkedIn to give practical ways for people to use ChatGPT to level up their personal and professional life across any industry.
Here are my tips:
1. Applying to Jobs
On the HR side, they have to use certain algorithms to try to identify the best candidates, because it's overwhelming. If they're using algorithms, why can't the applicant also use algorithms?
We can ask ChatGPT, "I'm about to give you a job posting, and I'm about to give you my experience. Staying true to what I actually do, please give me ways of shifting the words that I use, and of the positioning of my own experience, so that it can more accurately match up with potential algorithms that the HR company may be using for this job posting."
Then you iterate on the idea, and you feed it through again; you iterate, you feed it through again. Basically, it's just like matching algorithm for algorithm.
2. Doing research for networking with fellow professionals
Make sure that anything you're looking up, you're able to verify. I verify first that Bing, ChatGPT, anything like that, has the right person in mind.
Understanding that, I'd say, "Give me five professional talking points that might be relevant to their world. And three personal interests that they have that we may be able to bond around."
Get those things, and then verify that they're accurate.
3. Learning something new
Even with a close friend, there's a limit to how many questions you can ask them before you start to feel self-conscious.
ChatGPT will answer all of your questions, and go as deep as you want. It will give real life examples that you can understand and relate to, and define terminology that you may have long misunderstood.
For example, I was finding that after about maybe 30 minutes of asking questions to ChatGPT, I deeply understood APIs in a way it would have gone totally over my head otherwise.
4. Troubleshooting daily hassles
One of the things I wrote about on LinkedIn was on little frustrations — with word formatting, or iPhone settings, or how to get super glue off your fingers. You can Google those things, but chat requires no searching, and no scrolling through a website. It just tells you, and if that solution doesn't work, you can say, "Hey, that didn't work."
I did get super glue on my fingers. ChatGPT gave me four things to try, and concluded by reminding me to be patient and gentle so as to not hurt myself!
5. Going through long email threads
You know how on Gmail you have the email chain, that says, "There's like 16 things in the chain." And you're like, "Oh my gosh, I have to read through all of these to figure out what my action is."
So I pop it out in a new window, I CTRL-A, I CTRL-C, put it in ChatGPT, and then say, "Can you tell me if there's any action items for me in this thing?" It'll say yes or no, and then you'll say, "Okay, can you summarize in three sentences?"
It's a hugely valuable use case, because everybody has these long chain emails that they just want to say, "Can somebody just tell me what I need to do?" And you have a product to do that.