Ichio Suzuki is perhaps one of the greatest all-around baseball players of all time. 

If you combine his professional career in Japan with his time in the MLB, he has over 4,000 hits; he actually has more than Pete Rose!

One of the reasons is he was constantly working to be the best baseball player he could be.

From a young age Ichiro, a natural righty, trained to become a left-handed hitter so he’d be a few steps closer to first base. 

It sounds extreme, but it paid off. He’s being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer, garnering 99.7% of the vote – one of three such players ever to get that or higher*. 

 Ichiro reduced the amount of friction in getting to first base by literally reducing the number of steps.

How Far Would You Go?

How far would you go to reduce the number of steps in your work? 

Luckily, you don’t have to make yourself ambidextrous. You just need to look at what you’re repeating over and over again, and see how you can improve it. 

This week on Streamlined Solopreneur, I give you a really simple way to reduce some steps when working with AI: have a swipe file of prompts. 

There are lots of benefits to doing this: 

1. You’re not always reinventing the wheel.
2. The output you get from LLMs is more consistent.
3. You have a wealth of ideas to pull from when you sit down to work with AI.
4. With the right tools, you’re not copying and pasting.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you that text expansion was a simple way to reduce friction.

Creating an AI Swipe File

We can take that one step further, using a tool like TextExpander or Raycast, where you can have your AI Swipe File with some fill in the blanks, making your swipes more versatile. Here’s an example: 

This is in TextExpander. Notice I have a couple of fill-ins to add extra context to the prompt, without having to copy and paste the prompt and then changing the placeholders. 

This saves me a ton of time, not just because it has most of the prompt written for me, but because it’s also mapped to a text snippet, so I can easily type a few keys and have an entire prompt. 

Much like Ichiro, I’ve reduced the number of steps it takes me to work with AI (this is perhaps the only way I’m like Ichiro). 

If you want a starting point, I’ve updated my Automations Database to include my AI Swipe File. 

You can use the form below to get it.

And if you want to learn more about it, add the latest episode of Streamlined Solopreneur to your listening queue. 

I also want to give a special shout out to Doug, Charlotte, and Guy for sharing their AI Swipe Files. I talk more about each of them in the episode above. 

Do you have an AI Swipe File? Comment below and let me know! 

*If you’re wondering, the other two are Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera. Rivera is the only player ever to be inducted unanimously.