There is no more meaningful interest than demonstrated interest. Doing trumps saying. I witness it daily in dealings with vendors. Or, more accurately, I witness the lack of it. Who knew ChatGPT could demonstrate interest better than most humans — including me.

First things first: ChatGPT and its cousins, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are tools. They’re not a solution. Using them to produce finished work would be like using an electric-powered bench press. You’ll get in the reps, but you won’t build muscle.

Such was the case in Utah, where an attorney was sanctioned for filings that contained erroneous and false citations that couldn’t be found in any legal database. It turns out an “unlicensed law clerk” drafted the motion using ChatGPT, and no one checked the work before it was submitted. That’s some flabby mental muscle work.

“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Solomon was right about there being nothing new under the sun, but under our craniums swim the seeds of ideas no mainframe can match. Creating is still the sole domain of human thought. Our grey matter is capable of random connections that no algorithm can match.

Demonstrated Interest Demonstrated

So, how can this tool teach us to demonstrate interest better? Ask ChatGPT anything. Skip through the response to the last line. You’ll find a value-building question that probes beyond “is there anything else I can do?”

I find that to be a careless nail-on-the-chalkboard phrase that’s really asking, “I don’t care enough to think of how I can help you, why don’t you tell me?”

So much for demonstrated interest. To demonstrate interest, you have to be interested. Seems so obvious that ChatGPT does it after every response. I know you’re smarter than it is. It’s just actually doing the thing.

You’re Not Done Till It’s Finished…

And, it’s never finished. There’s always another step to be taken. That’s life, and it’s more rewarding when you ask a simple question the way ChatGPT does. Allow me to demonstrate.

I’ve taken to using ChatGPT as a planning resource for trips with my wife in our RV, The Guppy. I asked it: plan a route from my house with photo-worthy stops to Palo Duro Canyon.

In a snap, it suggested a route, drive times, photo options, and camp sites. But we weren’t done. It then asked about possible side routes. I modified the trip. It came back with three options. I chose B. It asked about creating a summary table of the trip. There were more edits, More ChatGPT suggestions, and variations of that simple value-building question.

Ready? Write this to your mental hard drive:

What else can I do here?

It’s a question for you, not the client.

Asking that of ourselves and sharing what it produces demonstrates your interest in better outcomes in any situation. It makes you a more valuable, uniquely human resource. Be careful with this; it could spill out into everything you do.

What are the next logical steps? What are possible illogical steps? Who needs to be alerted? What’s the timeline? Who can you contact to coordinate? Can you create summaries for the operations team? And so on.

Every answer leads to a question. Every question demonstrates interest. It’s so simple that even an algorithm can do it.

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