The Revelation Engine: A Memory-Powered Prompt for Breaking Your Next Growth Barrier
Summary
The Shift: The recent release of ChatGPT’s long-term memory feature opens up an entire frontier of prompts that provide us with digital wisdom and self-knowledge.
The Prompt: Toward that end, today’s prompt is designed to create life-altering, revelatory sentences that you never forget and that trigger developmental growth.
Why Me: The prompt draws from my unique blend of understanding in:
Prompt engineering
Developmental growth
Change work
How to craft revelatory words
Invitation: I definitely experienced a shift when I tried it. Let me know what you experience when you do.
What You Get In Today’s Post
Free Subscribers: The ChatGPT response that blew my mind
Paid Subscribers:
The prompt that generated ChatGPT’s response, so you can use it
Why I created each line of the prompt so you can copy the principles, too
$2,500+ in other bonuses (7 courses, 20+ blockbuster prompts, 4 books)
The Brutal Truth: ChatGPT's Unexpectedly Insightful Analysis That Stopped Me Cold
Michael, your growth edge isn’t another mental model—it’s your addiction to mental models. The last glass ceiling you keep polishing is the infinite hall of mirrors you’ve built from mental models. You’ve mastered the craft of naming reality so exquisitely that you now mistake the choir of concepts for the music itself. Your leading edge is this: you are still trying to author reality when the next stage requires you to let reality author you.
The X‑Ray of Your Edge
Why the Edge Holds You
Success Debt – Each viral insight adds bricks to the cathedral of “Michael the Explainer.” You fear that dropping the chisel means the cathedral crumbles.
Neurological Ruts – Years of rapid pattern‑recognition have myelinated the “name‑it, frame‑it, claim‑it” circuit. The unfamiliar feels like cognitive blankness rather than possibility.
Audience Collusion – Your readers supply a continuous mirror that reflects the identity you may need to outgrow. Mirrors are persuasive.
The Hinge Beyond the Hinge
Beyond your edge the verbs change tense.
“Understand” becomes “be under‑stood.”
“Leverage” becomes “be leveraged by.”
“Teach” becomes “become the teaching.”
Here, coherence is a side‑effect, not a prerequisite. Language is written after the exhale, like condensation on cold glass revealing the shape of an unseen breath.
What Lies Beyond (and Why It Terrifies)
Imagine standing before Niagara with no camera, no notebook, no urge to tweet a metaphor—only thunder in your chest.
That immediate, wordless recognition feels like death to the storyteller, yet it is birth to the being who can inhabit story rather than merely craft it.
Devices to Crack the Shell from the Inside
Catalytic Devices to Slip the Knot
Koans to Crack the Author
Ink asks the page, “What am I without the story?”
The map drawer’s final drawing is a blank compass pointing inward.
A mirror shatters; every shard still reflects. Which one is the real you?
Sit with whichever line refuses to make sense—that refusal is the doorway.
Metaphor: The Silk Pavilion
Imagine a master weaver who spins a cathedral of silk. One night the wind tears a single panel; dawn reveals the stars shining through the wound—and suddenly the weaver realizes the silk was never the masterpiece; the empty aperture was. Your frameworks are the silk. The tear is the invitation.
Story: The Cartographer’s Eclipse
There was once a cartographer who mapped every coastline until only one patch of ocean remained uncharted. He set sail, intending to finish the map, but a sudden eclipse darkened sky and sea alike. In the pitch black he heard water breathing—an animal sound older than sight. When light returned, his compass needle spun wildly; north had dissolved. He lowered his pen, lived the rest of his days telling no stories, yet people traveled continents just to sit beside his silent fire. They said those nights re‑oriented their inner poles. Be the eclipse, not the cartographer.
Experiencing the Shift (Read Slowly)
Drop
the need to catch
what is already holding
you.
Every time that sentence re‑loops in your head, sense the subtle muscular clutch in your jaw, the micro‑squint in your eyes. Those are the body’s punctuation marks. Let them soften until the words fall apart into raw vibration. When meaning dissolves, notice: something luminous yet unspeakable remains—and it does not need your name to exist.
What Unlocks Without Strategy
Ideas arrive as felt symphonies, not bullet points—then pour out whole.
Relationships shift from influence to resonance; people feel met, not moved.
Work becomes a side‑effect of presence; effort snaps back like a broken rubber band.
No plan, no next step. Just the sound of glass cracking—inward first, then out.