Prompts / Working prompt

Find Your Everest (and Your First Key Hire)

An hour-long strategy session in a copy-paste block: the interview that pins down the one mountain you're actually climbing, your natural role on the rope team, and the profile of the first key person you need beside you.

Where this one comes from

This week, on an immersion call in one of the communities I'm part of, the conversation turned to a familiar kind of stuck: too many projects, all of them plausible, none of them clearly the one. I mentioned, mostly in passing, that I run a prompt for exactly this — an interview that forces me to name my Everest and then tells me, based on my own answers, who I need to hire first to climb it.

After the call, a member texted me asking for the exact prompt. Sending a wall of text over WhatsApp felt wrong, and it occurred to me that if one person asks, ten people wanted to. So I'm publishing it, exactly as I use it.

Two things make it work. First, it interviews you one question at a time instead of asking you to write an essay — you can't skim your way through it. Second, it doesn't stop at the goal. The gap between your Everest and your natural role is precisely the shape of your first key hire, and most people never connect those two things. This prompt refuses to let you leave without connecting them.

The prompt

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT, answer honestly, and don't rush it. Budget 45 minutes. The pushback is the point — if it accepts your first vague answer, you pasted it wrong.

You are my strategic thinking partner. I want to get clear on two things: my Everest (the one big mountain I am climbing over the next 5 to 10 years) and the team I need around me to get there, especially whether my first key person should be an integrator or operator.

Interview me ONE question at a time and wait for my answer before the next one. Push back on vague answers. Make me commit to numbers, dates, and names.

Part 1, my Everest:
Ask me what my life looks like in 10 years if everything works: income, time, location, who I serve. Ask which of my current projects actually leads there and which are distractions. Ask what number makes me free (monthly income or net worth) and why that number and not another. Ask what I will never sacrifice to get there. Then write my Everest as one paragraph plus one sentence I can say out loud.

Part 2, my natural role:
Ask what work gives me energy and what drains me. Ask what I am objectively best at versus what I only do out of necessity. Then give me your honest read: am I the visionary (vision, deals, relationships, sales) or the operator (systems, follow-through, details, management)? Tell me what my answers show, not what I want to hear.

Part 3, my team spec:
Based on the gap between my Everest and my natural role, tell me the first key person I need: integrator, operator, partner, VA, or something else. Write a one page profile of that person: what they own, what success looks like in their first 90 days, and what I can offer them (walk me through common structures like salary, profit share, and equity with vesting). Give me 3 realistic places to find this person and the exact 3 questions to ask a candidate that reveal whether they are a real operator or just say they are.

Finish with a summary: my Everest statement, my natural role, my first hire profile, and my single next action this week.

What you'll get out of it

Four artifacts, not a feeling: an Everest statement you can say out loud without wincing, an honest read on whether you're the visionary or the operator (the model will tell you what your answers show, which is not always what you'd have said), a one-page profile of your first key hire including what to offer them, and one committed action for this week. The middle part is the one that stings — most people running three projects find out that two of them are distractions, in their own words, quoted back at them.

For SubTo and Owners Club members: close the loop with Malli

Part 3 hands you a one-page profile of the person you're looking for. If you're in the community, you already have a machine built for exactly that search: Malli — the AI that texts with you, learns your buy box, and brokers introductions through the HiveMind network. Two moves make the prompt's output real. First, text Malli your Everest statement and ask who in the network fits your first-hire profile — introductions are literally its job. Second, put both artifacts into your account's knowledge base, so Malli carries them into every call and introduction it makes for you instead of you re-explaining yourself each time. That knowledge base is the single highest-leverage surface in your account, and I wrote up how I use it — and how I plugged my own assistant into it — in I Plugged My AI Chief of Staff Into Malli. Here's What It Found.