A few words of advice for those in the majority…

This should be a short read — there is nothing that I will say here that you dont know already. But we need to be reminded of it every day…

Each day of your life, in this day and age where change will accelerate the pace of making people obsolete, you absolutely need to learn and expand your skill set.

It’s non-negotiable. If you dont learn something new each day, you will be rendered obsolete in very short order.

I can’t blame this fact for everything negative that has happened to me, but I can point to my complacency in certain skills to have contributed to my failures. Teacher, teach thyself…

Let me provide a few observations along with some prognostications:

1. The winding down of remote work is not necessarily because employers want to see your shining faces in the office, or that the physical co-location promotes higher productivity. I believe it is almost entirely related to empty space in new leased or owned buildings that shareholders have been asking if they are really needed. Do you really need big campuses for Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, etc… if everyone is working from their own home office and providing their own food and beverages? We’ve been warned that the value of commercial real estate is crashing, starting from the lockdown period, and that many commercial property owners will likely default on their financing because the per square foot values of their spaces is a fraction of what they were in 2019. That might explain why back to work mandates often come with threats of employee termination for those who refuse to comply — their stock values will tumble if they have unused diminished value assets on the books and it has been deemed to be unnecessary for business. Keep this in mind when you push back with force against going back to the office.
2. The rise of AI this past 12–18 months and the threat of making humans obsolete / irrelevant. This has many many people scared for their livelihoods — and if they believed their jobs and lives were safe and secure, well, this is a wake up call. Especially for those people who do work that is repetitive and time consuming but doesn’t take much brain power — you have something to worry about IF you dont take action and learn new skills. AI can become your best friend and increase your productivity if you allow yourself the time and effort to learn and contribute to the growth of this technology and it can be part of your employer provided education stipend (if they provide it as a benefit). Even if they dont — LinkedIn Learning has many courses and seminars that you can take relevant to your job function that will give you context for how to leverage AI to your benefit. You just need to learn something new each day.
3. The pace of change just accelerated 10x with the proliferation of AI even in its form today. It used to be some 20 years ago that when something new hit the public (I’ll go back even further, with the release of Windows 95) the prognosticators would say “just imagine what the world will look like in 10 years when the PC is in everyone’s home”. Bill Gates fulfilled the Microsoft goal from 1980 of having Personal Computers “on every desk in every home” by the early 2000’s. Steve Jobs in 2007 announced the iPhone as “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator in one device” — within 5 years not only did the competition have smart phones out and for sale, but most people owned one. Other examples exist now that changed how we live — eCommerce essentially killed brick and mortar, Bitcoin and other NFTs/blockchain/cryptocurrencies changed how money gets laundered… Where we are at with AI right now is an epochal change though, where one year from now the world will look completely different entirely because of AI. You as a person in the 99.99% slice of humanity needs to learn how to leverage AI to your benefit and make yourself more productive and invaluable as a result. There are no exceptions to that statement — you can’t count on having a job 12–24 months from now so you had better improve the odds for yourself.
4. With larger financial institutions, forward thinking companies and smaller countries creating their own crypto with the intent of replacing their domestic currency at some point, it will be inevitable that Blockchain will become the vehicle that contains your money in some way in the near future. Western banks are creating their own crypto, and setting up crypto trading channels fearing being left behind — dont be one of those who doesn’t learn enough and end up being lost in the technology, or worse yet get scammed by all the organized crime syndicates out there. The opportunity for this is astronomical, not just in money laundering but also in predation of people. I just read about one run by Chinese crime organizations centered in Southeast Asia called “pig-butchering” (article on Reuters here) where individuals in call centers/social network farms reach out to people, befriend them, and then convince them with fake data to invest through their app in crypto with promises of huge returns. The problem is, its all fake. So many people have lost life savings to date, to the tune of some $2.6B (as of Nov 2023) all being funneled to organized crime. Informed educated cautious people dont fall for get rich quick schemes because they use scientific method to investigate and get the facts — educate yourself and be sure to question things if they seem too good to be true.

There are a lot of less “top of mind” thoughts I could share, but seriously dont get left behind skills and information wise. 2024 will be an epochal year in so many ways — AI, Blockchain, Commercial Real Estate, the rise of Populism and domestic political fallout, leading to an inevitable global conflict that will come with it. Control that which you have control over — upskill yourself and make yourself more invaluable to employers such that it hedges and increases your value to other employers while making you less expendible when EPS and stock prices take the focus and cutting operating expenses means layoffs of you and many others.

I wish you all a wonderful end of year holiday season, and all the best for 2024.