Now that you understand the fundamentals of prompt engineering, let's discuss strategies for advancing your skills. Prompt engineering is a journey of continuous learning and refinement.

Thankfully there are lots of excellent resources out there to guide you.

Starting Your Journey

As you get started, focus on:

• Play more with AI. Whenever you are faced with a task always ask yourself “oh, I wonder if AI can do this?” This experimental mindset will open your eyes to what exactly AI can and cannot do.

• Practicing core skills covered in this guide. Nailing the fundamentals is more important than constantly adding new tools and techniques.

• Trying simple real-world examples. Make sure to work on actual projects that will be valuable for you and your business. Simply doing “exercises” in prompt engineering will teach you nothing.

• Iteratively testing and refining prompts. If a prompt gets the job done but is inefficient practice tuning it. It’s tempting to simply adds some more “workaround” prompts to get to your result - this will work but it’s messy. Instead fine tune the original prompt for practice. This will build your skills in refining and getting AI to do what you want. I

• Saving your best prompts to reuse and build on. When you hit pay-dirt don’t just lose that prompt. Instead save it somewhere - I use Notion personally. Use whatever note system you prefer.

• Joining communities to collaborate and learn from others. AI and prompt engineering is moving fast. Keeping up to date on everything as a single person is impossible. Instead tap into the excellent communities that are already out there and learn alongside them. AI is still so new that we are all finding our feet - this makes AI communities very welcoming.

The Prompt Entrepreneur Method

An applied approach to level up your skills is the Prompt Entrepreneur method based on learning-by-doing.

I’ve written lots of Prompt Playbooks, each focusing on a specific business model or function. By working through these Playbooks, you gain domain knowledge while honing prompts for real applications.

It’s a two fold learning experience - learning the content of building the business model whilst also learning the skills of prompt engineering.

I’m a firm believer in project based learning. This is learning and immediately applying what you learn to a real project.

If you don’t have a project then the learning doesn’t stick. You’ll just be doing exercises for the sake of it and then hoping to remember what you learned later.

By instead embedding learning in an actual project you’ll better remember and internalise the learning. You’ll also, as a nice side effect, build a worthwhile business asset through the project!

Prompt Playbooks contain:

• Step-by-step walkthroughs of business models

• Prompt engineering examples and templates

• Recommended tools and resources

Unlike most books about ChatGPT and AI my books aren’t just a copy/paste dump of prompts.

If you’ve made it through this Prompt Engineering 101 guide you’ll know:

1. These guides are detailed
2.
They are written by a human - me!

Expect more of this level of detail, written by a human for other humans, in my books.

I’ve kept all the books as cheap as Amazon allows me to make sure that they get into the hands of as many people as possible.

You can see the whole collection here: Prompt Playbooks.

Summing up

Well, I’m excited.

You are learning a hyper-valuable skill at just the right time.

And I’m fortunate enough to be a (small) part of that journey.

I only hope that I’ve been able to serve you properly with this guide and the suggestions for further exploration in the exciting world of prompt engineering.