I recognized the gesture immediately. I’d been making it myself for over a year.
The reach is always first now. We just stopped noticing it was a choice—or counting the cognitive tax we pay every time we make it.
My 90-Day ChatGPT Experiment ended in disappointment. The dashboard didn’t just report a loss; it reported a failure of soul.
$12.43.
That was the total payout for seven days of “peak productivity.” Seven articles, 12,000 words, zero typos, and enough SEO keywords to choke a search engine. I had spent three months building a “content machine” that was technically perfect and fundamentally unreadable.
… Read the rest “The Conviction Gap: The Career Skill AI Cannot Replace (And Most Professionals Don’t Have)”Quick read: Most mid-career professionals plateau at the same spot — somewhere between senior individual contributor and director. They produce great analysis, structure problems beautifully, and write competent memos. But they never quite cross into leadership. This piece is about what’s actually going on, why it’s getting worse in the AI era, and the three habits that close the Conviction Gap.
Quick map: this is the long-form essay. There’s a tighter Medium version, a 9-minute video, and a 60-second cut. Read first. The AI-Resistance Self-Assessment link is at the end.
I want to write about something I have been avoiding writing about for a while, because I am still inside the embarrassment of it.… Read the rest “The Borrowed Brain”
The career advice currently dominating your feed assumes the problem is your lack of AI skills. Across 312 interviews with professionals displaced by AI over the past year, that assumption kept being wrong. What actually separated the recovered from the stuck was something older, harder to teach, and almost entirely absent from the upskilling discourse.… Read the rest “AI-Resistant Career Capital: The 7 Skills That Outlasted 312 Layoffs”
