AI for Entrepreneurs: Part 2 Write The One Page That Stops You Explaining Yourself In Every New Chat
Markdown is plain text with four simple marks, and your first file should be one page about how you work.
You explain who you are. You explain what your business does. You explain how you like things written. Then you close the chat, open a new one tomorrow, and type all of it again.
That is ten minutes a day spent reintroducing yourself to a machine that forgot you. Over a year it adds up to days. Worse, you get tired of typing the background, so you start skipping it, and the answers go back to average.
What you will be able to do
Write a heading in Markdown using nothing but hash marks.
Build a one-page How I Work file that covers your role, your goals, and your rules.
Paste that file into any AI chat so you stop repeating yourself every time.
Name the things that must never go in the file.
Test in one question whether the AI is actually using it.
This is for anyone who saw a file ending in .md and assumed it was a coder thing. It is not. It is a note with a few hash marks in it.
The proof behind this
Liz Elliott runs her whole operation on AI automations spread across several computers, and plain text files like this one hold it together. She is not an engineer. She rebuilt a 403-guide archive into this 103-lesson course, and every lesson in it is one of these files.
What this lesson is
Lesson 1.2 of the free AI for Entrepreneurs course, in Module 1: What AI Actually Is.
An .md file is a Markdown file. That sounds technical. It is not.
It is plain text with a few simple marks that make it easy to read. That is the whole thing. You are not coding an app. You are writing a clean note.
AI reads these files very well, which is why they show up everywhere in AI work. Skills, instructions, memory files, agent notes. Under all of it is plain text with a few hash marks.
Think about a recipe card box in a kitchen. Each card is short. Each one has a title at the top so you can find it. Nobody needs training to read a recipe card. You flip to the one you need and follow it.
That is what a Markdown file is for AI. A note it can find and follow. Give an assistant a folder of these notes and it reads them like a table of contents, picking the right one when it needs it. Your work style is one card. Your business facts are another. Your rules are another.
The best first card is a How I Work file. One page that says who you are, what you do, how you like to be talked to, and what the AI should never do. Write it once. Paste it in, or save it in settings, and stop explaining yourself in every new chat.
That is why this course keeps coming back to files. A good chat helps you today. A good file helps you every day after that.
New here? Use the free AI for Entrepreneurs course outline to read this series in the best order.
Do it
Part 1: Learn the four marks
You do not need to learn a whole language. These are the marks you will use most.
One hash makes a big heading. Two hashes make a smaller one. Three hashes make a smaller one still. A dash makes a bullet.
That is enough to start. Everything else can wait.
Part 2: Write your How I Work file
The file should tell the AI six things:
Who you are.
What you do.
How you like to work.
How you want it to talk to you.
What you need help with.
What it should never do.
There are three ways to build it. Pick whichever one feels easiest. The finished file is yours either way.
By hand. Open a plain text file, name it
how-i-work.md, and fill in the template below.By interview. Ask Claude or ChatGPT to interview you, then turn your answers into a Markdown file.
By talking. Turn on voice-to-text, talk out loud for five minutes about your work, then say "turn this into a clean markdown file."
Part 3: Keep secrets out
This file carries context, not secrets.
Safe to include: your role, your goals, your voice, your business facts, your work style.
Leave out: passwords, card numbers, bank numbers, ID numbers, customer personal information, your home address.
The test is simple. If you would not paste it on a public website, it does not go in the file.
Part 4: Put it to work
The easy way works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and almost every AI tool. Start a new chat. Paste the priming line, then paste your whole file, then ask your question. Do this first, before you set up anything fancier.
To save it in Claude, open Settings, find the instructions section for Claude, and paste your file there. Now every chat starts with it.
To save it in ChatGPT, open Settings, go to Personalization, then Custom Instructions. You get two boxes. The first is for who you are and what your goals are. The second is for how you want it to talk to you and what it should never do. Each box has a size limit, so put a shorter version there and keep the full file for pasting.
Menu wording changes between versions. If you do not see those exact words, look through Settings for the section about how the AI should respond to you. It will be there under some name.
Part 5: Keep it alive
The file gets better the more you use it.
Every time you catch yourself explaining the same thing again, add that line to the file. Update the date at the top when you change it. Once a month, skim it and refresh your goals.
Then run the test question below. If the AI repeats your rules back to you, your setup is working.
Copy and paste
The Markdown marks
The four marks that cover most of what you will write.
# Title
## Section
### Small section
- Bullet pointThe How I Work file template
Fill in every bracket, delete what does not apply, and save it as how-i-work.md.
# How I Work
Last updated: [DATE]
## Who I am
[Your name, your role, your business or job, where you are based if it matters.]
## What I do
[The work you actually do day to day. Two or three sentences.]
## What I need help with
[The tasks you want AI help with most. List three to five.]
## How I like to work
[Bullets or paragraphs. Short or detailed. Fast drafts or careful ones.]
## How I want you to talk to me
[Tone, formality, length. Say it plainly, for example: casual, direct, no long intros.]
## What you should never do
[Your hard rules. For example: never invent a statistic, never send anything on my behalf, never use words I have banned.]The priming line
Paste this above your file at the top of any new chat.
This is my How I Work file. Use it for everything in this chat. Read it, confirm you have it, then wait for my question.The test question
Run this after you paste or save the file, to check it landed.
Based on my file, how should you talk to me and what should you never do?The voice-to-text instruction
Say this out loud after you have talked through your work.
turn this into a clean markdown fileWatch out
Adding secrets instead of context
Passwords, card numbers, bank details, ID numbers, customer information, and your home address do not belong in a file you will paste around. Keep it to context you would be comfortable sharing.
Making it so private it says nothing
The opposite mistake. A file with no real detail in it does no work. It should carry enough about your role, goals, and rules to change the answers you get.
Writing it once and never touching it again
The file goes stale. Add a line every time you explain something twice. Skim it monthly.
Keeping it in a note app and never pasting it
A file that lives in your notes and never reaches the AI does nothing. Paste it into the chat or save it in settings.
Making it so long the rules get buried
Keep a short version for settings boxes with size limits. Keep the full version for pasting and for Projects.
Check yourself
[ ] I can write a heading and a bullet in Markdown without looking it up.
[ ] I have a file saved as
how-i-work.md.[ ] It covers who I am, what I do, how I work, how to talk to me, and what to never do.
[ ] It has no passwords, card numbers, IDs, addresses, or customer details in it.
[ ] It has a date at the top.
[ ] I pasted it into a chat with the priming line.
[ ] I ran the test question and the AI repeated my rules back.
Do this now
Open a blank file, name it how-i-work.md, and fill in the template above. Ten minutes is enough for a first version.
Keep going
Next in AI for Entrepreneurs:
Part 3: The five levels of AI use, and which one you are on
Part 4: Starting the right way, and the first week that works
Part 5: The honest picture: energy, tiredness, attention, and where this goes
Every part of this course sits in reading order in the free AI for Entrepreneurs course outline.
This part is free, start to finish. Subscribing keeps the rest of the course coming and opens the paid parts.
Tell me in the comments what the first line of your How I Work file says, and I will point you at the right next part.