To an ignoramus like me, a house is either nice or ugly. But to a realtor, there’s something called ”curb appeal”.

Every job in every industry has its own jargon and lingo—did you set the right OKRs and KPIs? Send me the CTAs and CTRs ASAP!

Much of these terms are silly and somewhat arbitrary. But they exist because every professional has simply thought about their subject much more than every non-professional. They’ve spent a LOT more time with the problem than we have.

Even Einstein said, "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

For a realtor, the problem of selling a house is nothing new.

There’s not much I can teach the 80-year-old cardiac surgeon I golfed with about human anatomy, but he doesn’t know GitHub from Vercel and thinks a Pull Request is something naughty.

So it’s hard to judge AI if we don’t immerse ourselves in it.

Here’s an angle we don’t often see: An article on Ramp shows that companies that invest heavily in AI actually hire more than those that don’t, with companies that only invest a little in AI showing no noticeable change.

I find this particularly interesting because they say “Entry-level headcount grew even faster. At the companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level headcount grew 12% over the two years following adoption.”

And entry-level jobs are exactly the ones many are most afraid will disappear.

What does this mean for the younger generation entering the workforce?

As a millennial, we were in the same boat when we entered the job market: we couldn’t compete on experience and expertise, and the economy was in a series of downturns that we’re still reeling from.

But millennials got jobs because we understood technologies the older generation didn’t. That’s how we filled novel roles like social media manager, digital marketer, and so on.

I believe the trick is to find areas in which no one is an expert, so you can compete on a level playing field.

By understanding technologies that the older generations don’t, you can negate what you lack in experience.

And also positive: For existing engineers, the article says “If you are an engineer worried that AI will eliminate engineering jobs, our evidence says AI adopters are hiring engineers faster, not slower.”

It’s easy and tempting to create a grand software solution with AI because you think someone might like it.

Will you make something cool in a weekend? Undoubtedly!

…and you'll burn all your tokens in the process.

Instead of thinking about an imaginary customer or billion-dollar payout, solve one business process or problem for yourself.

Make one thing that’s always annoyed you more efficient.

Rinse and repeat.

That’s how you get real utility out of AI.

Intelligent people will go to incredible lengths to be lazy.

There’s a well-known quote from Bill Gates that perfectly sums this up: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Smart people so detest menial work that they'll spend months working on an app that prevents them from doing one repetitive action.

It’s a silly contradiction, but an important one: Hustle culture teaches us that the answer is just to keep grinding harder and to suck it up, but with AI, we’re all searching for the tiniest inefficiencies in our workflow and finding ways to automate/solve them.

Perhaps it’s a compulsion. Perhaps it’s misguided.

But I’d rather spend months solving a problem for good than getting carpal tunnel syndrome by copy and pasting the same thing every day.

(Spoiler: I also get carpal tunnel syndrome in my elaborate efforts to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Life is hard.)

Once upon a time, Instagram was a place filled with nice pictures and artsy filters.

Now? It’s a non-stop visual bombardment that would make the most seasoned Las Vegas hustler blush.

If we want to stand out there, we need to speak quickly and loudly, and make sure we promise fast cash or instant health within the first second of our video—why else would someone care?

This is no place for selling the wisdom of stillness, calm, and inner peace!

But in reality? Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor of all time, preached the kind of restraint and educated slow reasoning that would get him skewered on social media if he weren’t already a billionaire.

Being sober and sensible doesn’t sell. But it does pay, if we can drown out the noise.