Make It Yours: Set Up an AI That Knows You

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Every morning, I introduced myself to the same robot. Same one. Every single day. And it took me way too long to notice how ridiculous that was.

For weeks, every time I opened my Claude account, I started the conversation the same exhausting way. I'd type out my whole life before I could ask one useful question. "Here's my training, here's my latest blood work, here's my body composition, here's how I've been sleeping." Every. Single. Time. Like leaving a voicemail for someone who forgets me the second I hang up.

And one morning, mid-paragraph, I stopped and thought: why am I doing this to myself? I'm introducing myself to the same robot every day. It's like the thing has amnesia, and I'm the one stuck reminding it who I am.

So I fixed it. And it turned out to be the thing that took this from "neat trick I do sometimes" to "thing I actually rely on."

Last week you made your first Project. Maybe for a book, your book club, a Bible study. You gave Claude one place to live, you poured in the material, and suddenly it could keep up with you instead of starting cold every time.

That was the warm-up.

Because we pointed that Project at a book. This week we point that same power at something way more interesting.

You.

I'm serious. Last week the Project knew the book. This week we build one that knows your life. Your goals. Your numbers. Your history. The stuff you are sick and tired of re-typing every time you open a chat.

Let me show you what that looks like for me.

For a long stretch of my life I was a triathlon guy. Ironmans, Half Ironmans, the whole circus. These days I've shifted. Less swim-bike-run, more strength and putting on muscle, because that's the season I'm in now. The body changes, the goals change, and the plan has to change with it.

So I did the same thing you did last week. I made a Project. Except this one isn't about a book. It's about my health.

Then I started feeding it me. My WHOOP data on how I'm sleeping and recovering. My blood work when I get it pulled. My InBody readings, which is just a body-composition scan that tells me muscle and fat and where it's all sitting. I don't dump that into a cold chat anymore. I pour it into one Project that's been learning about me for months.

And here's the payoff. The other day I had a fresh set of numbers, so I came back and typed this:

I didn't re-explain a single thing. It already knew I'd moved from endurance to strength. It knew my history. It knew what my numbers looked like last time, because it's the one that holds last time. So instead of reading my data against some stranger on the internet, it read it against me. My baseline. My trend. That's the difference, and it's a big one.

And I've taken it a step further, which I'll just tease for now. I don't even paste most of it in by hand anymore. Claude helped me build my own little app to log my workouts, what I lifted and how it felt, and everything saves to a database Claude can read directly. In that same app I can jot down a quick journal entry, how I'm feeling that day, whether I slept like garbage or woke up ready to go. All of it flows into that one health Project.

If "build my own app" sounds like a foreign language, don't sweat it. It did to me too, not long ago. Building your own stuff is a rung we'll climb together in a few weeks. For now, just know it's possible, and a regular guy pulled it off. If you want to run ahead, hit reply and ask me.

Anyway, back to this week. The leap is simpler than any of that: same Project idea you already met, now aimed at your actual life instead of a book. Watch why it works.

Use case: Setting up a personal Project so Claude actually knows you

You already know how to make a Project from last week. So make a new one, but this time about your life. Find "Projects" in the Claude sidebar, start a fresh one, and give it a name like "My Health" or "My Side Business." Then drop this into the Project's instructions and swap the brackets for your real life. Be generous. The more you tell it now, the less you ever repeat. Delete any line that doesn't apply to you.

That's the setup, done once. After that, your day-to-day questions get tiny. "Here's this week's data, anything stand out?" "I felt run down all week, does that show up here?" "What should I prioritize next month?" You start a fresh chat inside the Project and it picks up right where you left off, every time.

Here's the concept, and it's the one that turns a chatbot into your assistant. Persistent context.

Fancy phrase, simple idea. It just means your setup lives somewhere permanent instead of you re-typing it every time. And the place it lives is the Project. You write who you are into the Project once, and every new chat you start inside that Project opens already holding it. Last week the Project held a book. This week it holds a person.

Picture two personal trainers.

The first one has total amnesia. Every session you walk in and re-introduce yourself. "Hi, I used to do endurance stuff, now I'm lifting, here's how I slept, here are my numbers." Every single time. You spend half the session catching them up before you do any actual work. Exhausting. You'd quit.

The second trainer knows you. Knows your history, your goals, your data, where you were last month. You walk in and just hand over this week's numbers, and they already get it. They pick up right where you left off. That trainer is worth their weight in gold.

A chat you start from scratch is trainer one. A chat you start inside your Project is trainer two.

One honest note so nothing surprises you later. This works because your context is sitting in that one Project. Start a random chat outside of it and you're back to a stranger who never met you. The magic isn't that Claude memorized you out in the wild. It's that you built one place that holds who you are, and you do your thinking out of that place. That's the trick.

And look how this stacks. Issue one: context is everything, tell it who you are. Issue two: actually talk to it, and you made your first Project around a book. This week is the next rung. You stop giving context every time and start storing it. Once. About yourself. So it's just always there.

You don't have to build a whole personal Project today. Start with one tiny version of the same idea.

Open Claude and tell it three true things about yourself before you ask for anything. Just fill in the brackets:

Watch how the answer fits you instead of fitting nobody.

That's the whole concept in miniature. Context first, question second. Once that feels natural, building a Project is just doing this permanently so you never have to say it again.

I'll be straight with you about this one, because it's the section where I want to be the most careful.

Like I said, I track my health pretty closely, and my health Project knows all of it. The shift from endurance to strength. My sleep and recovery. My blood work. My body composition. Months of it, piling up in one place that remembers.

Here's the story. A while back my doctor had me on a supplement to help with recovery. I'd done my homework on it, I was using it, and on paper it made sense. But I kept feeding my recovery data into my health Project, week after week, and at some point Claude flagged something. It pointed out a pattern in my own numbers, a dip in my recovery that lined up with the time I'd been on that supplement. It didn't tell me to stop. It didn't diagnose anything. It noticed something in my data that I'd been staring right past.

That gave me a real question instead of a vague worry. So I tested it. I came off the supplement for a period to see whether my recovery actually changed. It did, which told me the pattern was real. Then I made the call. Me. Not the robot.

That's the win, and I want to be precise about why. Claude didn't practice medicine. It helped me see my own data, against my own history, so I could ask a sharper question and make a better-informed call. That's all. That's also everything.

So one honest note, and it sits right alongside that story instead of against it. Claude is a fantastic partner for organizing your health, spotting patterns in your own numbers, staying consistent, and walking into the doctor's office with better questions. For the real medical calls, the decisions that actually matter, you talk to a professional. Claude just helps you show up to that conversation organized instead of guessing. It's not your doctor. It's a friend that helps you make sense of your own numbers. Keep those two things straight.

Step back from health for a second, because this is the bigger idea. Think of a Project as a little brain you build on the side. It stores up memory. It learns you over time. You feed it what's going on in your world, and it helps you think things through with all of that context already in hand. That's the shift. It stops being a tool you poke at and becomes something that thinks alongside you.

So here's your hand-off. You already made a Project for a book last week. Now make one for you. Pick one ongoing thing in your life. Your health. A side business. Your kid's school year. A hobby you keep meaning to get serious about. Build the Project this week. Pour your real context in once. Then come back tomorrow and ask a normal question, and feel the difference when it doesn't make you start over.

That feeling, the one where it just knows, is the whole point of this rung.

Next week we put your assistant to work. This week you built the thing that knows you. Next week it starts showing up for you. I'll show you how I have Claude run me a morning briefing: the markets, the headlines, even the gist of the podcasts I never have time to finish. Your own daily desk, ready before you finish your first cup of coffee.

Until then, you don't have to have it all figured out. Nobody does. And it's all okay.

Stop overthinking it.

Just get started.

JGS

P.S. Hit reply and tell me the one ongoing thing in your life you're going to build a Project for. I read every one, and the answers help me shape what comes next. You can always reach me right here.