Anchor Your Mission, Adapt Your Methods: Thriving in an AI-Driven World (w/ Zack Kass)
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Takeaway
We explore the coming AI revolution with Zack Kass, former head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI and author of The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential — not as a dystopian threat, but as an expansion of what one person can do and understand about the world.
You’ll learn why AI is driving us toward “unmetered intelligence” (abundant, nearly free access to cognitive capability), what happens when work can no longer anchor our identity to our work, and why the most valuable skills of the future aren’t intellectual at all — they’re humanistic qualities like curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to make people feel something.
Zack shares his framework for thriving in this transition: anchor on your mission but adapt your methods, learn how to learn rather than master any single skill, and design your work around the things AI fundamentally cannot do — the deeply human qualities that inspire connection and trust.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. Unmetered Intelligence: AI as the Next Critical Resource
Throughout history, every time we’ve driven down the cost of critical resources — water, food, electricity, the internet — we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of economic activity and human potential. AI is now following this same pattern, moving from expensive to “effectively abundant.”
Zack can run GPT-4 on his device in airplane mode for just the cost of electricity. The price curve has collapsed so fast that what once required massive infrastructure now runs on a single chip. This isn’t just about convenience — it’s about democratizing access to cognitive capability in the same way electricity democratized access to power.
But unmetered intelligence doesn’t mean universal brilliance. Just as having the internet doesn’t mean everyone does research, having access to AI doesn’t mean everyone will use it wisely. What it does mean is that companies won’t be able to compete on “how smart” they are for much longer. The competitive advantage shifts elsewhere.
This is why Zack and Ilya Sutskever coined the term in 2021: to describe a future where intelligence becomes a utility you don’t think about, like water from a tap. The question isn’t whether it’s coming — it’s what we’ll do with it.
2. Identity Displacement: The Emotional Cost of Automation
In October 2024, longshoreman union leader Harold Daggot went on CNN and pointed at the camera: “You have no idea how dangerous I am. I will cripple you.” His demand wasn’t more money or safer conditions — it was a guarantee against automation. The picket signs read: “Robots don’t pay taxes. Automation harms families.”
When Zack met with 30 longshoremen off the record, the pattern became clear: 85% believed they could find work elsewhere. The most important part of their job wasn’t the work itself — it was community. 95% had family in the union. 90% wanted their children to join. One said he’d keep having children until he had a son who could join.
This isn’t an economic crisis — it’s an identity crisis. Everyone benefits economically when we automate ports, including eventually the dock workers and their kids. We’re all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our benefit. But in a world of economic abundance, we may still experience net loss because we’ve attached so much of who we are to what we do.
Most people don’t fear AI will make them starve. They fear it will make them irrelevant. And unlike past technological revolutions where the sacrifice was economic, our generation’s sacrifice is emotional: learning to find purpose in a world where work changes too frequently to anchor identity.
3. Learn How to Learn: The Only Skill That Won’t Obsolete
When young people ask Zack what they should study in college, his answer frustrates them: “It doesn’t matter.” There’s a rapidly declining correlation between your major and your economic outcome. For the first time in American history, the median wage for someone with a college degree equals someone without.
The question they’re really asking is “How do I make money?” But in a world where today’s hot skill might be automated tomorrow, betting on any specific domain is risky. What’s guaranteed to remain valuable is the ability to learn new things quickly and deeply.
Go study something you love, not because it will get you a job, but because the act of becoming maniacally obsessed with exploring a subject teaches you what mastery feels like. Most people go through life never experiencing what it means to truly master something — to care so deeply about a topic that you pursue it for hundreds of hours not because you have to, but because you can’t help yourself.
That experience — of going deep, changing your mind, synthesizing information, defending ideas — is more valuable than the thing you studied. Because once you know what learning feels like, you can do it again and again. And in a world that changes constantly, your ability to adapt becomes your economic advantage.
4. Design Around the Negative Space: What AI Cannot Do
Here’s the revelation that changed everything for Zack: at his father’s lifetime achievement award ceremony (38 years as an oncologist), a former patient took the stage. For 30 seconds, she described her survival. For four and a half minutes, she talked about how his father made her feel.
She had seen four oncologists. All gave her the same diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan — “the algorithm” had determined the optimal path. She chose Zack’s father not for his medical brilliance, but for his hope and compassion. Her words: “In a world where the research and therapy is basically a commodity, the bedside manner is no longer a feature — it’s the product.”
AI pursues human intellectual equivalence, not emotional equivalence. In a world where you can become an expert in anything in 30 minutes with ChatGPT, how you inspire people and make them feel becomes the primary differentiator. Your expertise becomes commoditized, but your ability to connect, to empathize, to make someone feel seen and heard — that remains irreplaceable.
This is why companies should hire for adaptability, curiosity, courage, wisdom, empathy, and humor. These humanistic qualities are the “negative space” of AI — the things the technology fundamentally cannot replicate, and therefore the things that will become exponentially more valuable.
5. The Transition Will Be Weird: Finding Purpose Beyond Work
In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote “The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren.” Against a backdrop of starvation and despair, he predicted a 30-hour work week by 2030 and posed a challenge: “For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”
The evidence is overwhelming now. Deathbed studies show no one wishes they’d worked more. Blue Zone studies (places where people live to 100) identify factors like community, walkability, and multi-generational households — none involve how much people work. The happiness function is clear: we’re happiest with friends and family in physical community.
But we’re in the transition period, and it’s going to be strange. Our generation must make sense of a world where work changes too frequently to anchor our identity. The sacrifice isn’t economic — it’s emotional. We must learn to answer “Who am I?” without reflexively pointing to our job title.
The answer, Zack believes, is already known: we should spend time with friends and family, build physical communities we want to be in, and live meaningfully in those spaces. The work your local government does — building protected bike lanes, installing sidewalks, creating inviting public spaces — matters more than almost any federal policy for your actual day-to-day wellbeing.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. What would you do if work could no longer be your primary source of identity and purpose?
Think honestly about this. If your job title, your career trajectory, your professional achievements couldn’t anchor who you are, what would? Where do you find meaning outside of work? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s the point — our generation is going to have to reckon with this question whether we want to or not.
2. When you think about your own learning, have you ever experienced true mastery of something you loved?
Not competence — mastery. That feeling of being so obsessed with a subject that you pursued it for hundreds of hours not because you had to, but because you couldn’t help yourself. If you have, how did that change you? If you haven’t, what’s stopping you from pursuing something that deeply now?
3. In your current work, how much of your value comes from what you know versus how you make people feel?
Be honest. Could someone with ChatGPT and three hours of learning replace the intellectual content of what you do? If the answer is yes (and it probably is for most of us), what’s the part of your work that remains irreplaceable? How are you optimizing for connection, trust, and the human qualities that can’t be automated?
🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY
The future belongs to those who can anchor on mission but adapt their methods.
This is the paradox of the coming renaissance: everything about how we work will change, but the deepest human needs — for connection, meaning, community, purpose — remain constant. The trap is trying to hold onto the methods (your current job, your specific skills, your professional identity) when you should be holding onto the mission (what you want to contribute, who you want to serve, how you want to make people feel).
Zack’s framework is deceptively simple: anchor and adapt. Be crystal clear on your mission, vision, and values — what you’re trying to accomplish in the world, what matters to you, what you stand for. Be immovably committed to that. But be completely flexible on your ways and means — how you accomplish those things, what tools you use, what your day-to-day work looks like.
The people who struggle will be those with high conviction in their methods and low conviction in their mission. The people who thrive will be the opposite: fiercely committed to their purpose but endlessly adaptable in how they pursue it. They’ll learn how to learn. They’ll optimize for humanistic qualities. They’ll design their work around what AI fundamentally cannot do.
Most importantly, they’ll remember that in a world of increasing abundance and technological capability, the point was never to work more — it was to live more fully. With friends and family. In physical spaces that invite connection. Pursuing mastery in things we love not because they’re economically optimal, but because caring deeply about something might just be part of the meaning of life.
The Renaissance is coming. The question isn’t whether you’ll be affected — it’s whether you’ll be ready.
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