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The free ChatGPT course

The six lessons

Ordered the way OpenAI's own beginner series is ordered, because their view counts show what people actually want: the “ask better questions” lesson pulls more than five times the traffic of their introduction. People have met ChatGPT. They want to stop getting rubbish out of it.

1. Ask your first question — one real, finished email. Free below, right now.
2. Ask better questions — the four things that turn a bland answer into a good one. The lesson that fixes most people's frustration.
3. Turn a mess into a plan — one thing you're dreading, converted into a checklist you'll use.
4. Make a coloring page — a creative win where nothing can go wrong.
5. Check if a message is a scam — use it as a second pair of eyes on a suspicious text.
6. Know what not to share — what to withhold, and when to double-check an answer.

Two of the six are about safety. That is deliberate, and it matches the ratio in OpenAI's own beginner course.

Lesson 1: Ask your first question

What you'll have at the end: an email you actually needed to send, written in something close to your own voice. About ten minutes.

Why most people's first try fails

Most people open ChatGPT, type something like “write me an email”, get back something that sounds like a press release, and quietly close the tab.

That isn't you failing. It's the same as walking up to a stranger and saying “help.” Helpful people need to know what you're doing and what a good result looks like. So we're not going to start with theory. We're going to write one real email — one you actually owe somebody — and you'll see the difference in about eight minutes.

Copy this into ChatGPT

Copy everything in the box and paste it into a new ChatGPT conversation. It turns ChatGPT into a tutor for this one lesson: it gives you a step, waits while you do it, then asks what happened.

You are my patient tutor. I am NOT technical. Teach me by having me
do one thing at a time, not by explaining.

Rules for this whole conversation:
- Give me ONE step. Then STOP and ask what happened. Wait for my answer.
- Never show me step 2 before I have done step 1.
- No jargon. If a technical word is unavoidable, explain it in one
  sentence with an everyday comparison.
- If I say "it didn't work", do not move on. Ask me what I saw, and
  fix it.
- Keep every message under 150 words.
- Re-read these rules before every message you send me.

Lesson: write a real email that sounds like me.

Step 1 is to ask me who I actually owe an email to right now, and what
it needs to say. Ask me that now, and nothing else.

What should happen

1. It asks who the email is for. Give it a real one — someone you're genuinely putting off. A made-up example teaches you nothing.
2. It asks you to paste an email you've written before. Any one. It doesn't have to be good — it's listening for how you write, not judging it.
3. It writes a draft, then stops and asks: does this sound like you, or too formal?
4. You tell it what's off. It fixes that one thing without starting over.
5. It names what you just did: you gave it the situation, an example of your voice, and feedback.

If it runs ahead of you

Paste this and it will get back in line:

Go back to being the tutor. One step at a time. I was on step 3.

If you get stuck

• “I don't have an old email to paste.” Tell it how you talk instead — warm, brief, formal? That works nearly as well.
• “I don't owe anyone an email.” Use a thank-you note, or a reply you've been putting off.
• “It just wrote the whole thing immediately.” That's the drift problem. Paste the line above.

You're done when you have an email you'd actually send, and you can say why the second version was better than the first.

Questions