With a Keyboard in My Hand, Lord Lord

Relevance and Identity in the Age of AI

I’ve been playing with AI intensively recently, getting a feel for where it’s at and what it can do.

And I've been shocked at how it can write like me.

And challenge my thinking.

And routinize some of my best aspirational habits (like asking, “What’s the risk of doing or not doing X?” or “What important questions have I not asked?”)

And I have to admit, I’m having a bit of an identity crisis. 

Is AI Replacing Me?

As a writer, I feel myself wanting to default to the ChatGPT version of my newsletter, web page, or email. Writing it myself, from scratch, is starting to feel like a lot of work, compared to the ease of sharing a prompt, a previously written piece to be reworked, or even speaking my stream of consciousness into a dictation app. 

Cue the folk song about John Henry, the best railroad steel-driver who won a contest against a steam engine and immediately afterwards died of a heart attack. 

As a coach and consultant, I can train AI to think like me and ask questions like I do, but with far more predictability and discipline. (Kind of like an advanced form of the therapy trope “And how does that make you feel?” but way more strategic-sounding.)

Sure, it doesn’t have what I think of as my “intuition” — but that reminds me of comedian Emo Philips’ remark that he used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body until he realized what organ it was that was telling him that. 

Maybe my intuition is just like a giant AI: simply the sum total of all the data I’ve accumulated in my life, stored in a big unconscious database until I need to call upon it to decide if I should work with that organization (are those happy or nervous butterflies in my belly?) or whether to order the pasta or the paella.

Who Must I Become in Order to Stay Relevant?

In short, I’m feeling caught between who I am and who I suspect I need to become. 

And I know I’m not alone. Whether it's adapting to new skills required at work or keeping pace with technology transforming our daily lives, we're all navigating these waves of change that challenge how we define ourselves.

If you've ever felt attached to a particular role or skill as part of your identity, you've probably already experienced that as a trap. 

Marshall Goldsmith taught me that in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Many of our greatest strengths, the roles we've embraced because they made us feel competent and valuable, might actually hold us back as we take on more abstract responsibilities and move from activity to leadership.

In the same way, our familiar roles and skills can become obstacles when some new tech can perform them better, faster, and cheaper. Imagine excelling at tasks you've proudly mastered, only to find they can now be done better by technology (or less competent team members with the aid of technology). 

How do we maintain our sense of self-worth when it's tied to roles that are losing relevance? (“I’m the best steel-driving man in all of West Virginia!”)

The converse is also true: by becoming fluent in AI and other emerging tech, we can suddenly find ourselves in the strange position of being good at things that we used to suck at. Or find ourselves enjoying tasks that we previously dreaded. 

Curiosity About Becoming

The key to not spiraling into an identity crisis is to approach this whole thing with curiosity. 

None of our identities are permanent. Not the ones we’re proud of and lean into and put in our LinkedIn profiles; nor the ones we try to avoid, hide, or mitigate.

They're all simply beliefs, and we can evolve them (and even drop them all and simply be) as we learn and as new technologies challenge and empower us to redefine our capabilities.

I find this exciting. One of my spiritual teachers, Beth Green, told me, “Don’t wake up every day and recreate yourself in your own image.”

Instead, she explained, approach each new day with curiosity and openness. 

With this new marching order, what might you discover about yourself as you consider the impact of AI on your work, life, and potential? 

Oh and in case you’re wondering, I wrote all the words of this article myself. Delve delve delve delve delve. 

Want to talk about how you can shine and thrive in the Age of AI? Want to know which skills are expected to be critical for job excellence by 2030? Let's talk.