4 Prompts to turn ChatGPT from a Lazy Librarian into Your Intellectual Blacksmith

How Mortimer Adler’s 1940 manifesto exposed our AI note-taking trap.

I was staring at a blank page for an article on Europe’s best-performing education system. I knew I had one really good quote about school autonomy tucked away somewhere in Roam.

I spent 30 minutes searching through tags like #learning and #schooldevelopment before finding a single one. By then, my 'second brain' had shut the creative window.

I felt a familiar, frustrating paralysis. I'd spend more time searching for a note I vaguely remembered than actually thinking with the ideas it contained. I had built a museum for other people's thoughts.

It reminded me of an essay I’d read years ago by the philosopher Mortimer Adler, "How to Mark a Book."

Adler’s argument was that a clean, pristine book is a sign of an unengaged mind. The only way to truly own a book, he argued, is to have a conversation with it—to underline, to question, to argue in the margins. To leave your intellectual fingerprints all over its pages.

Adler would be horrified by our digital second brains. But the problem isn't just that they are unmarked libraries. The problem is that I, like many others, had been aspiring to the wrong thing.

What if the goal isn't a pristine warehouse, but a messy, productive intellectual forge?

A warehouse stores things. A forge transforms them.

Information is the raw iron ore, brittle and useless on its own. The mind is the forge where, through the heat of focused attention and the hammer blows of critical inquiry, that ore is transformed into tempered steel: novel, flexible, and useful insight.

If you've ever felt that frustrating paralysis, overwhelmed by your own beautifully organized system, you're not a failure. But like me, you've fallen for the seductive architectural flaws of the warehouse model.

The act of highlighting, capturing, tagging, and linking creates a satisfying sense of accomplishment. It feels like intellectual work. But as cognitive scientist Robert Bjork's work on "desirable difficulty" shows, this effortless collection often leads to zero long-term retention. We've created a perfect system for what psychologists call the "illusion of competence." We feel like we know the material in our library, but we've merely mastered the art of shelving it.

To break that illusion, we need to stop collecting and start creating. The solution is not a better filing system, but a better set of skills.

Instead of one rigid protocol, here is a flexible toolkit of forging techniques. Each is designed for a specific stage of the thinking process, turning your Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini from a lazy research assistant into a powerful set of tools for your forge. It provides a set of practical techniques for using AI as the tools of the craft—the bellows, the hammer, the anvil, and the quenching bucket—to shape raw information into durable knowledge.

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Four Forging Techniques Adler Might Love in 2025

Each technique is designed for a specific stage of the thinking process, turning your AI from a lazy research assistant into a powerful set of tools for your forge.

🔥 Technique 1: Break Your Assumptions (The Bellows)