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Have been thinking about future of careers.
Have some predictions.
(I also have chocolate cake on my shirt, so adjust your expectations accordingly.)
- If you're currently employed. As in, if you're currently wearing a blue polyester pant in an office right now after having just eaten a lukewarm caesar salad wrap from the cafeteria in the basement? (That used to be my everyday when I did advertising sales.) What you need to ask yourself is this: If your boss saw a year's worth of your work with your name removed, would they know it was yours? Would the work be different without you?
That, right there, is about to be your sharpest edge: your weird. Your particular voice. Your particular decision-making rationale. Your particular challenges to the thinking. Your particular creativity. Your particular form of persuasion. Your particular empathy. Your particular judgment of people and situations. Your particular ability to care. To stand up for something you believe in. To make it matter.
Of course, this is also what every corporate professional has been taught to minimize, unknowingly. Nobody taught you to "rock your weird." That was, uhhhhhh, unprofessional, Becky. Instead, what we all did was try to fit in and speak in the stuffy register and do things according to the book. So you wouldn't get fired. Or have caesar salad thrown at you.
Now? The fastest way to get fired is by ~only~ doing things by the book. Because if you can write instructions for it? And anyone can do it? That means that AI can, too.
Throw yourself into your work more than ever.
- If you currently work for yourself. It's time we pulled out some buckets. You know those hot neon orange ones from Home Depot? Let's pull a couple of those out. And, let's do the one thing we have been taught NOT to do: put yourself inside one of 'em. (Okay, fine, that's boxes. But "buckets" sounded more fun.)
There are two buckets we find ourselves tap dancing around.
One bucket = Democratized Work.
The other bucket = Professionalized Work.
Democratized Work is the work you do when you're being paid for output: The blog post. The product descriptions. The standard NDA, the bookkeeping, the campaign setup, the slide decks, the real estate listings, the photo edits. Work that used to require an expert because nobody else could do it, and now doesn't, because now anybody can. This is simply reality. But, don't get mad, there's a happy ending. Not that kind.
Professionalized Work, on the other hand, is the work you do when you're being paid for your professional opinion. Brand direction. Litigation strategy. Diagnosis under ambiguity. Deciding what to build. Choosing which market to lose on purpose. Saving the account that's about to churn. The recommendation the client doesn't want to hear.
The Democratized Roles? Those are the ones where AI makes the work easy for bonehead non-experts like me. Like me having Claude do all of my bookkeeping in Quickbooks. (It's actually running the task now.) Or me using AI to build an entire brand-new publishing platform to house my body of work. I'm 100% a non-expert in both of those fields. And, don't get me wrong: my bookkeeper and my web designers will know more about those things than I ever will in nineteen lifetimes. But alas, AI has nonetheless democratized the playing field. The knowledge is still valuable, but the gate is gone. Just like when the internet first let us all publish our ideas for free.
Professionalized Roles, on the other hand? Other direction. These are the ones in which AI can't democratize the work, because the work is human judgment, not human output. AI doesn't make it easier for non-experts like me to do: it makes it easier for the actual expert to do more of what they do, better, because all of their time is now freed up for the higher stakes. Because, that's the entire job now.
(Read more on "Democratized Roles" vs "Professionalized Roles")
So, the question isn't "am I an expert?"
You probably are.
But, the important question now is: "What is my expertise currently pointed at: output or opinion???"
The new goal will be moving from the former to the latter.
And the best way to do that?
Is to find work you really care about.
Figure out what you think about it.
And then tell the world.
Because what we need right now isn't more information.
What we need are more people who have thought critically about the information—and can lead.
Free up your days so you can think like a badass.
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