Why your Custom GPT Won’t Work (and the 48-Hour Rescue Mission)
What’s inside?
🧑💻 The mindset flip: treat your GPT like a junior hire, not a piece of software.
⚙️ SOPs > prompts: why bolting on a clear, bullet-proof workflow instantly levels up output quality.
📚 Rules vs. knowledge base: the single most common structural mistake - and how to fix it in minutes.
🔄 Iterate like a dev: simple edit-test loops that turn “average” into “80% done for me”.
🌟 Show, don’t tell: how curated examples teach your bot what “good” looks like.
🛠️ Troubleshooting trio: quick fixes for vague answers, hallucinations, or bland, off-brand copy.
🚀 48-Hour Challenge: a step-by-step sprint to debug your weakest GPT and get it producing win-worthy work.
(Psst… after the episode you’ll know exactly why those snazzy GPT Store templates rarely survive real life.)
Highlight Reel
🍕 Last-class energy - Wrapped up a term of Digital Marketing at YorkU.
Students surprised me with cake; I came back with pizza.
Highlight: watching them step out into an AI-forward marketing world with Blue Ocean thinking.
(The future of marketing is in VERY good hands.)
✉️ Inbox glow-up - Grammarly recently acquired my long-time email ride-or-die, Superhuman.
Yes, I’ve paid $30/month since pre-pandemic. Why I’ll keep paying: ultra-clean UI + AI-assisted triage that saves me hours a week.
Can’t wait to see what agentic email looks like under Grammarly’s roof.
☕️ Mentor coffee > Zoom meet - IRL catch-up with mindset queen Megan O’Neill.
I finally got IRL time with my long-time mindset mentor (and all-round brain rewiring queen) Megan O’Neill - in a tiny viral pizza joint festooned with pink wisteria 🌸🍕
Megan has helped me yank out the subterranean stories that cap growth!
She’s also a Pivot pro - having moved from mindset to Pinterest systems. She’s turning “pretty pins” into predictable traffic pipelines for experts who are done with feast-or-famine socials.
Stay tuned… a live podcast recording may be brewing.
(Reply PIZZA for a spectator pass.)
⚙️ A Day-in-my-Life (aka. How I see how far I’ve come with AI)
Here’s a peek into the entire day when I met Megan for coffee last week.
Mapped an affiliate plan for Marketing Power Circle with Leigh Mitchell.
Talked life + AI + Pinterest with Megan O’Neil
Played part-time chauffeur, dropping my teen at a park hangout and picking them up - without resenting the detour.
Saved my afternoon coffee from a milk crisis when the timing synced with an in-progress Instacart’s order.
Graded a stack of student projects, cross-checked citations, and logged final grades.
Re-engineered an offer roadmap on a client call while munching peanut-cucumber salad (that I meal prepped with the help of AI - it’s a house favourite recipe though).
Wrapped up early while my husband raided the mid-week meal-prep stash for dinner while I cued up our current decompression ritual: MasterChef Australia - because listening to calm judges praising granitas is the antidote to Gordon Ramsay shouting about poorly cooked meat.
Pre-AI Susan could never have stacked strategy, teaching, parenting, admin, and an IRL coffees into one Friday. Time felt like a hostile witness, and in-person anything was the first thing to get axed.
The difference now isn’t hustle; it’s leverage:
Agentic email cuts my inbox hours in half.
Custom GPTs save me hours in repeated instructions and missed pattern.
Grocery GPTs buy me back headspace and hours.
Result? White space for the human stuff - unhurried mentorship chats, viral pizza, actual eye contact with my kid.
If your days still feel like a Jenga tower, know this: AI has handed me back HOURS that were leaking away unnoticed. And that has made room for a life that’s finally happening offline, in real time.
If you want to reclaim your own calendar, here’s more information on my AI Implementation Mastermind - Marketing Power Circle.
