Exercise 4: Your First Waypoint

This exercise builds on Exercise 2. If you have not built your cognitive profile yet, go back and do that first.

Open a new conversation with any LLM. Use the most advanced model available with extended thinking turned on. In your first message, paste the full output from your Exercise 2 profile, then directly below it paste the following prompt. Replace the bracketed section with something real: an idea you have been carrying around, a question you keep coming back to, a problem you have not been able to frame clearly enough to make progress on.

I have an idea [________________] I'd like to explore, it's stuck in my head and I want to get it out. Interview me. The output will be a markdown document "waypoint-001.md" and should describe enough for me to start new sessions in the future to continue my exploration with a large language model. Ask me no more than three questions per turn, and ask no more than twenty-one questions. The output should target about five hundred to one thousand words max. Do not rush, keep going until you think we've explored enough to express the idea.

The "001" in the filename is not decoration. It means there will be a 002. The waypoint captures enough context that you can hand it to a fresh conversation weeks or months from now and pick up where you left off. That is the practice.

Read the waypoint the LLM produced. Look for the parts that surprised you: connections you did not expect, phrasing that captures something you have been carrying but never said out loud. Notice the difference between this exercise and the profile you built in Exercise 2. The profile was about you. The waypoint is about an idea you care about, explored through you. Calibration first, then exploration.

Some people who try this will write things they have wanted to write for years. Some will discover that the creative capacity they had been told they lacked was there the whole time, waiting for a channel wide enough to carry it. LLMs do not provide the creativity. They provide the reach, the patience, and the non-judgmental open channel. What comes through the channel is yours.