Worked 2 decades in in consulting. Made Partner in my 30s. Led teams of 100 people. Run 9-figure client portfolios. Lived and worked in 4 continents. Young people are entering the workforce at a strange moment. AI can draft your emails, build your slides, write your code, analyse your data, simulate your voice. The default advice sounds smart: "Upskill" "Learn AI" "Be adaptable" Obvious stuff. Let me give you 5 slightly heretical (but useful) ideas if you actually want leverage in the AI age. Not survival. Leverage. 1) LEARN TO SELL BEFORE YOU LEARN TO BUILD Everyone is learning to build with AI; who's learning to sell? Because production is cheap, distribution is not. In my experience, markets reward those who can convince others that something should exist and then align capital, people & narrative around it. E.g., Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player, or the smartphone. He sold a vision of WHY they were cool. Or Elon Musk. You can argue about him all day, but he bends capital markets through narrative force. Young people obsess over becoming technically formidable. Good, but if you can't: > articulate a problem in a way that feels urgent > create emotional energy around a solution > negotiate compensation/scope > pitch yourself w/o sounding desperate AI will outperform you on the build, and someone else will capture the upside. 2) BUILD SENSE-MAKING AI can generate infinite variations but it can't reliably tell you which one is elegant. You need pattern recognition aesthetic strategic sensemaking. You need the extraordinarily valuable ability to say "This feels right"... and be correct 90% of times. Steve Jobs called it "taste". Designers call it judgment. I prefer discernment. Where does it come from? Exposure. Feedback. Long apprenticeship. Studying history. Reading widely. Being around people better than you. Caring about the craft. Everyone can create, but can you curate? That's the challenge I'm giving myself. 3) CHASE POSITION AI makes you faster. So what? Speed in the wrong direction is basically accelerated irrelevance. Young professionals obsess over productivity hacks, automating emails, summarise meetings, generate slide drafts. BS. Meanwhile, someone else is positioning themselves closer to revenue, clients, capital allocation. You want exposure to projects with visibility, problems tied to money, roles adjacent to decision-makers. If you become the most efficient note-taker in the company, AI will replace you. If you become the person who reframes what the company should be doing, it won't. Simple. 4) LEARN TO WORK WITH AFRAID HUMANS I see AI is making people anxious. Managers worry about irrelevance. Employees worry about layoffs. Executives worry about being disrupted. Walk into that fear and stabilise people: > explain AI w/o hype > show people how it augments rather than humiliates them > design transitions instead of revolutions Look at Satya Nadella. He pivoted Microsoft to cloud & AI, and changed the internal psychology of the firm from know-it-all to learn-it-all. If you understand identity & ego, you will navigate the AI era far better than someone who just knows Python. 5) OPTIMISE FOR OPTION VALUE Prestige brands still matter. McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google still open doors. But if you optimise purely for logo collection, you might wake up one morning highly employable and strategically constrained. The AI era will produce volatility, with entire functions that will shrink and new ones that will explode. Option value means: > skills that transfer > geographic flexibility > intellectual independence > networks that span industries > income streams that are not singular Status feels good today but options protect you tomorrow. Chase convexity: small downside, large upside exposure. You want an identity not fully fused with your employer. When layoffs come (they will) your sense of self doesn't disintegrate. All the best!

Final stop: the Sony factory in a drab Tokyo suburb. Steve Jobs hated it. Messy, inelegant, too much done by hand. Back at the hotel, Bob Belleville, Apple’s Macintosh hardware manager, argued they should use Sony’s 3.5-inch disk drive because it was ready to ship. Jobs refused. He chose Alps Electric instead and ordered Belleville to stop working with Sony. Belleville decided to protect the Mac schedule. Quietly, he kept Sony as a backup in case Alps missed deadlines. Sony sent its lead drive engineer, Hidetoshi Komoto, a Purdue graduate who had designed the drive, to Cupertino to help the Mac team integrate it. The problem: Jobs did not know Komoto was there. So whenever Jobs walked over from his office to visit the Mac team, which he did almost every afternoon, the engineers scrambled to hide Komoto. They were afraid Jobs would shut the plan down. At one point Jobs even ran into Komoto at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized him from Japan, but did not suspect anything. The closest call came when Jobs suddenly entered the Mac workspace while Komoto was sitting in a cubicle. An engineer rushed over and whispered, “Quick, hide in this closet. Please. Now.” They shoved him into a janitor’s closet until Jobs left. Afterward, Komoto calmly said, “American business practices are very strange.” Then Alps admitted it was at least 18 months behind schedule. At a retreat in Pajaro Dunes, chairman Mike Markkula pressed Jobs on the disk drive problem. Belleville finally revealed that Sony’s drive was ready. Jobs paused, realized why he had seen Sony’s top engineer in Cupertino, and broke into a grin. “You son of a bitch!” He was not angry. Once he understood that Belleville and the team had disobeyed him to save the product, Jobs thanked them. They had done exactly what he would have done. - From the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson

I distilled my 4 years of marketing lessons into minimalistic visuals. 1. Sell Benefits. Not features.

Marvin Gaye’s voice isolated from music, "I heard It through the grapevine" from 1967.

Elon Musk's Unbelievably Simple Killer Break Down on Climate Change. Thank you @DavidCarbutt_ and team for producing this video!