Thoughts

What is love? Take a moment. Think about what love is at the end of the day. There are many many ways of interpreting it. This debate is about as old as time. What I am about to talk about is a very narrow interpretation of it. It’s romantic love, but not just standalone, but through an evolutionary lens.

Evolutionary speaking, love is a task to pass on your genes with a mate. What does this look like in practice? A ton of emotions. Joy. Angst. Elation. Depression. It’s super messy. But at the end of the day, it’s because both partners are very invested. (I think this is called the “honeymoon phase”, which, on average, exists as long as it needs to exist to protect a baby. Think about it, humans, unlike other mammals, come out of the womb half cooked. We take time to develop, and therefore require a lot of care. Evolution has rewarded parents that stuck together to protect their young. Other precocial mammals, like horses, whose young come out of the womb practically ready to go, don’t really care about their partners). Anyways, back to the honeymoon phase, look at the actions of both partners. They’re constantly communicating, maybe even obsessed/infatuated, etc. And that’s a generalization, it’s everywhere. This is a product of 27,000 generations over the 300,000 year lifespan of a human.

Now, I want you to apply this topic to work. What’s the job of love again? To pass on your genes. Do you think two partners who never felt anything towards each other were able to create the miracle of life? And watch it succeed into adulthood? My guess is absolutely not. They were out-competed by those with passion. You have to actually love your partner for the miracle of life to happen. Only the people who loved, and who turned that love into action, were actually successful in this evolutionary job.

So what about for work? And the job of the entrepreneur? Do you think someone who is ambivalent, or antagonistic towards their job is ever going to get anything notable done? Once again, of course not! You have to have the same level of passion if you wanna really really want to get something done in a successful manner. You have to be just as obsessed as it feels to be in love. This means constantly working on your project, and being infatuated with it to the point you are thinking of it in the shower.

The good news, if you are searching for success, is that so many people hate their jobs/what they do for work, or are straight up just lazy, that if you find a way to be in love with what you do, being successful, my guess, will be relatively easy.

Further questions: is that infatuation with work what we call “drive” by today’s standards? or is it something that you have to manually override and artificially create? Or how do you find what you love?

I think that to answer this question, we first need to define what technology is in the context of how it's impacting our lives. As a student, and someone who is part of Gen Z, I think that there are two ways to view technology. The first is broader while the second is more narrow in its impact to me specifically. In the broader sense, which impacts everyone, technology is awesome. Safer airplanes, wifi, air conditioning, the internet, better medicine, etc. All of these are things that I can take for granted any day of the week. However, I'm sure that I am living a better, longer life than any king did a few hundred years ago. Technology, along with better (what does 'better' even mean?) political/economic institutions (which caused which?), are to thank for that. So in this broader sense, I can say thank you to technology for the improvement it has had on my quality of life.

In a more narrow sense, as with direct impacts on my life, the main ways that I see technology impacting me are through the apparatus of smart phones/social media and AI. One of which impacts my day to day life, whereas the other impacts my life as a knowledge worker (i.e student and future white-collar worker). First, let's examine its impact on my day-to-day life. I think that we've strayed away from the original purpose of technology. It used to be that technology was created to enhance your life. The original Steve Jobs keynote of the iPhone in 2007 was just that. A means for navigation, music, calls, and emails. That's it. Your iphone was supposed to support you. Now, unfortunately, you support your iphone.

Phones and social media have been engineered to be addictive (see this fascinating video of Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, testifying in front of congress on how these pieces of technology are built to hijack our attention). In summary, we, as humans, are still operating on paleolithic software (i.e our brains haven't evolved much from being cavemen), and aren't adapted for the god-like technology we have today. The impact? We are junkies. The brain craves novelty, and the iphone supplies it, while providing no life fulfillment or satisfaction. I see this similar to junk food and cigarettes, and I think that only now with the proliferation of research on the negative impacts of technology we are finally starting to see a small movement against the way it has overtaken our lives.

Forecasting into the future, I hold a belief similar to Cal Newport (see his Op-Ed in the New York Times titled 'There's a Good Reason You Can't Concentrate') in that we will have a cognitive revolution in the near future, like how we had a fitness revolution in the 1980s (note that running used to be deemed as weird until we found out it has amazing health benefit. To help illustrate this point, see this story of how early Nike employees had garbage thrown at them as they would go for runs in the 1980s because it wasn't normalized yet in society).

Anyways, as I now see I'm running over the wordcount, I'd say that I think AI will negatively impact our ability to think. With that being said, is that really a negative thing? If anything, it's only negatively impacting our ability to think in situations where we use AI, so as we enter the future why focus on those skills anyways? Blair Effron, co-founder of Centerview, an elite wall street investment bank whose business model relies on intellectual capital, said that AI does analysis that used to take his analysts weeks is now being done in a couple of hours. If so, why would you want to invest resources into being good at some form of analysis that AI will automate in the future anyways? I think that we're being overly reactive about the situation. Let AI do the work that it can do for you, and focus on what it can't do. Don't try to override what AI can do because the models will only get better, and firms, which are driven by improving their bottom line, will obviously use AI to cut costs (see Greg Jensen, CIO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds, words on how his firm is implementing AI). So I don't think one should try to fight this force, but instead see where it's going and adapt to it. Where specifically? I don't know. That's a harder question to answer… However, I do believe it may have to do something with more entrepreneurial endeavors and less work-for-a-salary endeavors.

Five questions I'd ask a C-suite executive

1. How is your firm implementing AI as of right now?
2. What is AI getting right? What is AI getting wrong?
3. Does your firm protect deep work?
4. What skills would you direct your kid to learn today? What job?
5. Looking back on your journey of success (professionally and as an individual), what really matters? Also, what would you do the same? What would you do differently?