How to Become a Systems Thinker (Even If You Have Never Built a System)

If you want to become a systems thinker but you have never built a system in your life, this post is for you. The answer is simpler than it sounds. You become a systems thinker by building your first system, and with AI that first system can take you minutes.

I know this because for most of my career, systems felt like a foreign language to me. About seven years ago I joined an entrepreneurial organization where my mentors, Andy Frisella among them, drilled one idea into our heads over and over: systems scale, systems scale. I believed them. I had also never built a system in my entire life. It reminded me of meditation. It took me about 50 times of hearing "give yourself five minutes of peace" before I actually tried it. So I finally asked myself the question every aspiring systems thinker hits: how do you become a systems person when you have never built one? Here is the answer I share with every client, and the one I gave on a podcast recently: "The way that you become a systems person is by building your first system. That's it."

What Does It Mean to Become a Systems Thinker?

It means you capture how you do repeat work so it can be run again, by you or by AI.

A system is just you doing something repeatedly. That is the whole definition. You already run plenty of them. The work is writing them down.

Here is why this matters right now. Systems scale, and in the AI era the reason you want to become a systems thinker is that AI is the number one thing that can scale any system you give it. If you do something more than once and you hand it to AI, AI can now do it.

So the shift is small. Every time you catch yourself doing a task for the second time, you ask one question: what is my system for this?

How Do You Become a Systems Thinker If You Have Never Built a System?

You build your first one. Pick a task you have already done twice, and turn it into a repeatable template with AI.

The method is plain. The way to become a systems thinker is to build one system, see it work, and let that first win show you the next one.

That is the real compounding effect. One of the things I always say to my clients is the more you see, the more you can see. Once you see that you can build a system for one task, you start spotting systems everywhere. A system for content becomes a system for booking podcast guests. That becomes a system for following up with guests after the show. Then outbound research. Same thinking every time, pointed at whatever you want to scale.

How Do I Use AI to Build My First System?

Ask AI for the system before you ask it for the output.

Here is the example I walked through on that podcast. When ChatGPT started creating images, the obvious move was to type "create me a YouTube thumbnail for my show," get something a little janky back, and post it.

What most people miss, and you only learn this by doing it more, is the better question: "what is my system for creating a thumbnail consistently, at a high quality, for every episode?"

The only thing you need to change takes about ten seconds. Say something like this:

Then: "Great, now that you have the template, do that every single time." The output gets significantly better, and now you own a system you can run on every episode.

If you want to go deeper on the prompting side, I break down the prompting system I use as an entrepreneur step by step.

How Should I Talk to ChatGPT or Claude to Get Better Results?

Talk to it like a new employee. You are the boss. Give it the goal, the how, and when to come back to you.

Here is how I teach this to everyone I work with, especially at the beginning. Picture day one with a brand new intern. You would give them the goal, show them how you want it done, and ask them to come back to you when it is finished.

AI works the same way. And it works best when you start from the end. I call this outcome-based prompting. One of the things I always say to clients is uncertainty leads to inaction. As I put it on that podcast, "If you don't know what to do, you're probably going to do nothing." So skip the how entirely. Say what you want to exist, start at the end, and let AI build you the roadmap to get there.

That is also how systems get built inside a business. If you want to see how I do this with founders, here is the 92-8 method I use to create a system for AI.

Where Should I Save the Systems I Build With AI?

In a second brain you own, outside of any single AI tool, so every system you build compounds.

This is the piece most people skip. You have an idea, you build with it, you send it to action. Our goal is to ship the work. But if you log what you did, like that thumbnail template, and you send it somewhere, you get reusable context that compounds your intelligence.

I use Notion for this. It is my second brain in Notion, my single source of truth. Here is why it matters. If everything you do lives inside ChatGPT or Claude, you are stuck there. I teach my clients to be tool agnostic. Whoever is winning this month, my data stays in a place I own.

It also means your ideas stop disappearing. Say "log this idea in my Notion so I can come back to it." A week later you can say "go into my Notion, pull up those ideas, tell me which ones I have not acted on, rank them, and let's start with number one." That only works when the system lives somewhere AI can read it. When it does, you stop starting from scratch every time you use AI.

Why Should Entrepreneurs Become a Systems Thinker in the AI Era?

Because AI multiplies whatever system you hand it, so the person with systems gets the leverage.

The first week ChatGPT came out, I tried to break it. When I ran my sports marketing agency, writing a full social media strategy for a brand took me about 30 days. By platform, by day, by content calendar. I asked ChatGPT to do it. Thirty minutes later it had built the whole thing. My first thought was simple: if it can do this, then it can do anything.

From that moment my lens was growth. My goal is to turn one dollar into a dollar fifty. When you look at AI that way, every task you do more than once becomes a candidate for a system, and every system becomes something AI can run.

That is the opportunity in front of you right now. All it takes to become a systems thinker is one task, one template, and one place to save it.

Your First Three Steps

1. Pick one task you have done at least twice. A weekly email, a social post, a client follow-up. Something real.
2. Ask AI for the system first. Use the thumbnail prompt above and swap in your task: "Before we do it, give me the system we are going to templatize to run this every single time."
3. Save the template and run it again. Log it in your second brain, then use it the next time the task comes up. That second run is the moment you become a systems thinker.

The Close

Systems scale. I heard that idea over and over before I acted on it, and everything shifted once I built my first one. Pick the task. Ask for the template. Save it. Then pay attention to what you start to see.