My plan to stay relevant in the early AI age

How to keep your job a little longer

Financial compounding is a powerful, but reasonably well-known concept among knowledge workers. Small investments growing exponentially over time is understood and often applied in our personal lives, but not everyone understands intellectual compounding: the ability to accumulate knowledge in a way that multiplies your decision-making power exponentially.

AI is improving exponentially and we’re about to be in a new world driven by AI well within your career if you’re GenX or younger.

In this new technological age, your past experiences matter less, what matters is how fast you can learn, adapt, and make high-quality decisions.

and then they came for management’s jobs

Intellectual Capital: The Real Competitive Advantage

Some of the first thinkers to talk and write extensively about Intellectual Capital were famed investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Their real edge wasn’t financial acumen—it was mental models, decision-making frameworks, and the ability to accumulate and process information better than everyone else.

Now, with AI accelerating everything, intellectual capital is even more valuable. The ability to synthesize ideas, ask better questions (including to your AI of choice), and think across disciplines is what will separate those who thrive from those who struggle in the coming months and years.

Intuition is Just Compounded Knowledge

Intuition isn’t just a gut feeling, it’s actually pattern recognition deeply ingrained into your neuron pathways, it’s your brain making fast decisions based on your past learnings.

If you feed your brain often with a lot of varied, high-quality insights, your intuition becomes sharper. If you don’t, well, this is essentially what the AIs are doing and they will outthink you.

The key for humans is the same as the AIs: compounding results coming from reading, thinking, and applying knowledge over time.

Learning is the Ultimate Career Moat

With AI replacing many cognitive tasks right now, and a reasonably high probability it will be able to do most or all cognitive tasks in the near future, your ability to learn will be your biggest advantage.

The best learners:

1) Curate their information diet

• Signal over noise // quality over quantity

• Limit news intake

• Delete social media on your phone (you won’t doom scroll on your computer, you just won’t)

• Keep only Substack, your read-later app, and maybe the Kindle app on your phone (I more than quadrupled the number of amazing Substack essays I read by having it be the only interesting thing besides chess.com on my phone, shoutout to

  Elle Griffin
  from
  The Elysian
  for this tip)

2) Think in systems

• Don’t memorize facts, they can be looked up in seconds

• Learn first principles

• Learn systems

3) Try to find overlap between unrelated subjects

• Innovation often comes from applying one field to another

• Read widely across subjects, go deep on anything that piques your interest

• Consume quality fiction

4) Learn to learn

• Your mind is a muscle

• Read books and blogs on learning

5) Use AI as a tool, not a crutch

• Even if the AI is helping you write, you need to rewrite it

• Even if the AI is helping you research, you need to read the source material yourself too (or at least skim it)

• Even if the AI is helping you code, don’t just copy paste and execute, read the code and understand it, especially if it works well

• Have longer back-and-forth conversations with the AI, push back, ask questions, bring in the data you read somewhere else and engage… you now have a very smart, endlessly patient colleague at your fingertips 24/7 … use your AI

You don’t need to outwork AI. You need to outthink those who don’t know how to use it effectively. This will buy you another 3-7 years past everyone else until we’re all out of a job. After that we can all hope for UBI.

Special thanks to Sizhao Yang for writing an old Twitter thread I still re-read that partially inspired this :)