How I AI: Build Your Personal Board of Advisors
A prompt for creating advisors you can invoke when you're stuck
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the voices in my head.
The useful ones. The thinkers and mentors whose questions I channel when I’m stuck. “What would Jim Collins ask here?” “How would Charlie (Munger) reframe this?” I don’t know these people personally, of course. But they—at least their persona—now holds a seat on my personal board of advisors.
Most leaders I work with also have these voices. Authors they return to. Mentors whose frameworks or relationships shaped them. Sometimes fictional characters, or characters now passed away. But these influences stay scattered because we don’t formalize them into something usable.
So I built a personal board of advisors using AI. Eight seats, each with a distinct function. An inverter who stress-tests my assumptions. A simplifier. A builder who pushes me from advising toward making. A poet who holds the meaning questions. Each has specific questions. Specific situations when I’d invoke them.
I built it in conversation with Claude, my second brain. Now you can too.
How to Use the Prompt Below
Copy the prompt below into a conversation with your AI assistant. It walks you through four steps: mapping influences, identifying gaps, designing seats, creating invocation protocols.
A few notes:
Do this in an AI tool where you’ve already built context—Claude’s memory, ChatGPT’s memory, or a long conversation where you’ve shared background about yourself. Richer context means a more tailored board.
Resist filling every seat with heroes. The board works best weighted toward challenge. You need advisors who ask the questions you’re avoiding. I excluded anyone whose main job would be validation.
Choose people whose work you can study. If someone’s on your board, you should be able to go deeper when you need to. Public figures with substantial bodies of work are easier to invoke. Private mentors whose wisdom lives only in your memory are harder to channel. You can use archetypes—”The Contrarian Simplifier”—if function matters more than personality.
Be specific about invocation triggers. “Use when making big decisions” is too vague. “Use when I’m tempted to add complexity instead of choosing” gives you something to recognize.
What Not to Do
Don’t treat this as a one-time exercise. The value comes from invoking your board out loud with the AI. “Run this through the Munger lens” should become habit.
Don’t let the board go static. Your challenges evolve. Your advisors should too. I have an empty seat—an “India Realist”—that I’ll fill during this current trip to where I grew up and where we now spend increasingly more time closer to family and friends. Leave room for yours to grow, too.
Don’t expect perfect channeling of the advisor persona. The AI offers an approximation—a different perspective when you’re stuck in your own.
I’ve found my board most useful for the questions it surfaces. When I convene all eight voices on a decision, they rarely agree, and that’s the point. Disagreement makes the trade-offs visible, and it helps me see more clearly what I’m actually choosing.
Happy building!
