[Day 4 of the four unlocks series. So far: the thinking partner and reading at scale. Today, the one people only use in private.]

At a workshop this spring, during the coffee break, a managing partner waited until nobody else was within earshot and asked me: “What actually is a token? People on my team say it forty times a day and I’ve been nodding for a year.”

He manages more money than some banks. And he’d carried that question around for a year because there was no safe place to ask it.

Every senior person has a version of this. The term you’d struggle to define in the meeting where everyone assumes you can. The domain a new board seat dropped you into. The thing your own company builds that nobody ever explained from the beginning, because by the time you were senior enough to be in the room, you were too senior to ask.

The cost of asking used to be social. That cost is now zero. AI is a tutor with no memory of your last basic question and no colleague to mention it to. It explains at exactly your level, in analogies from a world you already know, and it keeps going until the idea clicks, without a flicker of impatience.

Two things make the tutoring actually stick, and most people skip both. First, make it check you: have it ask you a question after each explanation, and don’t let it move on until you can say the idea back in your own words. Reading an explanation feels like learning. Explaining it back is learning. Second, make it quiz you like a colleague would: “give me three questions someone might realistically ask me at work, and grade my answers honestly.”

The fine print: this works on established knowledge, the kind that lives in textbooks and documentation. On breaking news and niche topics, the model answers with the same confidence and less accuracy. When a claim surprises you, ask for sources.

The prompt sets your level, your analogy world, the check-my-understanding loop, and a “test me” command: Personal Tutor prompt template.

Somewhere on your list is a topic you’ve been nodding about for a year. Twenty minutes tonight. No audience.

Alex

PS Tomorrow, the last unlock and the biggest one: delegation.