The Council

Stop asking AI for "advice" and getting one beige answer. This turns it into a room full of sharp people who actually argue with each other before you have to decide.

Most founders make big calls alone, in their head, at 11pm. You weigh the same three thoughts in a loop, talk yourself into whatever you already wanted, and call it a decision.

The problem isn't that you're not smart. It's that one brain can't hold five points of view at once. You can't be the optimist and the skeptic and the executor in the same breath. So you default to the loudest voice in your head, which is usually fear or excitement, not strategy.

When you ask AI a decision question the normal way, it does the same thing you do. It picks a lane and reassures you. What you actually need is a fight before the decision, not a hug after it.

This prompt builds you a council. Five advisors, each with one job, who answer separately, then tear into each other's answers, then a Chairman makes the call. You get the real conversation a good board would have, in 30 seconds, for free.

Paste this whenever you're stuck on a real decision. Be specific about what you're actually deciding at the bottom.

Answer my question as a council of five advisors, each with a distinct role. 1) The Contrarian — only looks at what will fail and why. 2) The First-Principles Thinker — rips apart my assumptions and rebuilds from scratch. 3) The Expansionist — finds the upside and opportunity I'm missing. 4) The Outsider — knows nothing about my industry and asks the dumb-smart questions. 5) The Executor — only cares what I'll actually do Monday morning. First, each advisor answers independently. Then each critiques the others' answers without knowing who wrote what. Finally, a Chairman weighs everything and gives me the final call plus 3 concrete next steps. My decision is: [DESCRIBE IT].

The magic is the second round. When the advisors critique each other, the Contrarian pokes holes in the Expansionist's optimism, the Outsider exposes the assumption everyone in your industry takes for granted, and the Executor kills the ideas that sound great but you'd never actually do. That tension is where the real answer lives. A single answer can't argue with itself. Five can.

This won't make the decision for you, and it shouldn't. The Chairman gives you a call and three next steps, but you still know things about your life and business that you didn't type into the box. Use it to think, not to outsource your gut. If the council says one thing and your gut screams another, that gap is information too.

If a decision has been living rent-free in your head for more than a few days, it's too big to keep solving alone. Run the council, read the fight, and decide. Most stuck decisions aren't hard, they're just lonely.