Starting Over - Twenty Again

Every professional I know uses AI today. We fall into two camps:

1. Excited as hell
2. Concerned for our future

I'm excited as hell, and I think that you should be too, but I understand being concerned. It's not clear that our job will exist next year. It's not clear that we will still have marketable skills. We have no idea what we're going to do with our lives.

We've been through this before! This is life in our twenties.

When you're Twenty

When you're twenty you're new to the workplace. You don't have any skills or opinions to speak of, so you go about quickly getting some. You explore. You do internships. You jump between jobs. You try new things. In short, you learn.

You're starting from scratch, which is painful and scary and humbling, but the world is wide open and you can do anything, which can be kinda fun.

When you're Forty

Usually as you age you learn hard-won lessons and develop expertise. You translate that expertise into a financially rewarding and stable job where you pump out lots of productivity for lots of money. You stop exploring and settle into a safe and satisfying career.

We explored. We learned. Now we get to sit back and reap the fruits of a mature career. Right?

Now you're Twenty Again

That's what was promised, but that's not what we got.

No, our generation gets to be twenty twice! This time with more grey hair! That's maybe OK though. It's an interesting time to explore.

Remember that we're not competing with senior professionals in our field (everyone turned twenty at the same time) so no one knows what they're doing any better than we do and we all get to reinvent ourselves and the world together.

Advice

Your job may not exist in a few years. You have two choices:

• Operate as normal: Maybe this will all blow over? Maybe AI is over-hyped?
• Explore: Learn to use AI in your job. Look at getting a new job. Learn new things.

Exploring is scarier now. I get it. We have kids/mortgage/aging parents. Exploring is a risky option and we want to be safe. Sadly, there is no safe option today and you need to figure out which is less dangerous, exploring, or sitting still.

If you sit around and operate as normal then my guess is that you'll have a hard time in a couple years. Maybe don't do this.

Instead, if you act like you're twenty and explore then maybe things work out. If it's encouraging, exploring is what those of us who are excited as hell are doing, and we're having a blast.

Taste

I've given this spiel a few times. I've often get response that rhymes with the following:

"Yeah, and we're still valuable because we developed taste over several years"

To which my response is

At least half of my "taste" I developed over the last year working with AI

There's a lot to learn today. Now's the time to learn it because no one knows anything yet, and we're all twenty together.

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