How You Can Do Things That Make Sense

Table of Contents

• Focus of the Week: Who is Actually Using AI at Work?

• Mindset: Make Informed Decisions

• Life Skill: Be Interested > Be Interesting

• Career Advice: Show Them

• This is Cool: Paperplane Therapeutics

FOCUS OF THE WEEK
Who is Using AI at Work, According to Data

A couple weeks back, Anthropic released a report to help us understand who is using AI at work, and how they’re actually using it.

Instead of surveys or speculation, they analyzed millions of real interactions with their AI, Claude, to get a clear picture of what’s happening across different jobs and industries.

Some key takeaways:

• AI use is most common in software development and technical writing—37 percent of AI-related tasks come from those fields.

• More than a third of jobs already use AI for at least 25 percent of their tasks, but only 4 percent rely on it for three-quarters or more.

• AI is enhancing work more than automating it—57 percent of AI use is augmentation (helping people do their jobs better), while 43 percent is automation (doing the task outright).

• AI adoption is concentrated in mid-to-high-wage roles like programmers and data scientists. Lower- and higher-paying jobs see much less use, partly due to practical barriers and AI’s current limitations.

This is the first step in an ongoing effort to track AI’s impact on work over time.

They’re also open-sourcing the dataset so researchers and policymakers can build on our findings.

Typical technology adoption generally follows a curve like the one below.

Based on those usage numbers, I think we’re still in the Early adopters phase.

At least when it comes to people who have found consistent ways to make it a part of their every day work life.

Or if you’re like Conor, in response to Anthropic’s report, you argue that these numbers have nothing to do with real adoption.

From his perspective, these numbers show that people are really just tinkering, and experimenting, not shifting how they work.

The people who have already shifted their habits are encouraging others to create time for them to explore.

I’ve seen many people treat ChatGPT like Google, and/or feed tools garbage prompts and expect perfect magic. Obviously that’s a recipe for disaster.

AI is magic, but it’s not that magical.

In an effort to help others see the AI light at myBlueprint, I recently created a Slack channel called #gen-ai-exemplars for people to start sharing how they’re using different tools as part of their day to day.

And hosting little lunch n learn sessions to introduce different tools I’ve been exploring.

Both are optional, but I’m hoping it will help contribute to a culture of exploring, and documenting.

Here is the recording and snippets from our internal NotebookLM lunch and learn this week if you’re curious.

NotebookLM is free and is one of my favourite tools. Watch the beginning of the full workshop recording to see how I struggle to explain what it does.

Todays full NotebookLM Workshop (36min at 1x)

• Jordans Use Case

• Alexandre's Use Case

• Carlos' Use Case

• Damian's Use Case

The Anthropic data was interesting, but it was global.

Luckily, Andrew Parkin and the team at Canadian Survey Stuff, shared some similar research about what it looks like here.

If I’m reading this correctly, it seems like a lot of people are familiar with the tools.

But that isn’t translating to actually using them at work. Or admitting to it.

The adoption, and habits around using AI at work might be slow in general, but the shift is coming. It’s inevitable.

Comments like this from the Chief Marketing Officer at Hubspot, and CEO of Shopify are not uncommon in the tech bubble they play in - talking to AI more than they talk to their colleagues.

One generally useful mental model I’ve heard Tim Ferriss talk about from an investment lens is to ask “what are the nerds doing during their evenings/weekends”, and then invest in that thing.

Right now, the nerds are all in on AI 🤓

MINDSET OF THE WEEK
Make Informed Decisions

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this story.

Student thinks they want to enrol in a four year university program, to pursue a career in X field, because they took a class or two in high school and found it interesting.

Or because it’s a career that adults or society in general speak highly of.

Computer engineering/software development is a big one for this.

It’s cool to be a developer these days, and they get paid pretty well, so it must be a good career for me, right?

Many of those students I talked to had only completed a basic ‘intro to programming’ course in high school. If that.

But there’s a pretty big difference in learning basic programming as a skill, and deciding you want to pursue that as your first career.

Students rarely talk to people actually working in that role/industry.

This was my mistake.

And it’s a mistake that can be easily avoided.

With a helpful push from my family, I had decided in grade 11 that I would study to be a lawyer. Luckily for me, I chose to study in an undergraduate program that was well set up for students who wanted to pursue a career in law.

In your fourth year, you got spend time, and shadow different legal professionals.

In that short, formative experience, I was quick to realize that these were wonderful people doing work that I wanted no part of.

But it took me four years of undergrad, and a bunch of student loans to get to that realization.

I should be grateful. I have friends where that realization for them didn’t come until law school, or later.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

This fall, I’m piloting a Life Skills Club at a high school in my community for students to apply a lot of the mindsets and life skills I talk about in this newsletter.

One of the final outputs will be for students to use their newly developed cold outreach skills, to book a few meetings with people from industries they are curious about, to put themselves in a position to make more informed decisions.

I’m also going to teach them how being interested, will make them more interesting.

LIFE SKILL
Be Interested > Be Interesting

This is a networking cheat code.

If you meet someone and they do nothing but talk about themselves for half an hour, you’re probably going to think they’re a turd.

On the flip side, if that person does nothing but ask you questions about you for thirty minutes, and seems to be genuinely curious, you’re going to think they’re amazing.

People like people who make them feel good.

And when someone is actually listening to you, asking follow up questions, and putting YOU in the spotlight for a change, that’s going to make you feel good.

I’m going to borrow that term.

Reverse Charisma.

Or Reverse Rizz for my younger readers.

It is significantly easier to make someone else feel interesting, and charismatic, than to try and do that yourself.

Not only does this strategy help you become well-liked, it helps you become well-learned.

Just remember to not make the your questions feel like an interview or interrogation.

I’ve coached many young people who go into zoom calls well prepared to ask the person questions, but it feels more like a checklist to be completed, than a relationship to be formed.

Easy way to do that is:

1. Smile. It’s easier to open up and share with someone who is smiling.

2. Listen to what the person is saying and respond with natural follow up questions to what they just said.

And treat it like a rep. Each one gets easier.

CAREER ADVICE
Show Them

This is a message that I’ve shared with the Modern Life Skills community many times before, and will continue to do so until it becomes the rule, not the exception.

In many industries, your resume/cover letter is a necessary evil, but it’s not enough.

One of my favourite cheesy quotes to share with students I coach is “just because someone gives you option A and option B, doesn’t mean you can’t create your own option C”.

Of all the things I share with them, that’s the line they love to come back to me about after a couple of years when it finally clicks, and they start seeing it work for themselves.

The specifics will differ depending on the industry, company, and even person hiring, but in general, when applying for a job, you will want to be able to answer these two questions well.

1. Why this job?

2. Can you do what is asked of you in this job?

When you’re early in your career, or transitioning into a new one, you might not have all of the skills they’re looking for, yet.

That’s okay. There are ways for you to show that you’re someone who has the intelligence, drive, and mindset that will allow you to figure it out.

Skills are teachable. Most employers understand that, or at least claim to.

It’s much more difficult to teach initiative.

In the LinkedIn post above, there is a video. In it, Ciaran talks about his friend wanting to break into a social media management role. He explains that submitting a resume will land her in a stack of resumes, with very little differentiation to someone else just starting their career.

So to stand out, his friend created a tik tok account to highlight how she would run, tweak, and manage social media campaigns of her own, i.e. evidence of how she would do the job she’s applying for.

That opens the door. She now has employers coming to her.

If you don’t have experience, be creative and create your own experience.

Even if it’s not exactly the same, it shows employers you actually give a damn, and that you can likely do the job.

THIS IS COOL
Paperplane Therapeutics

Some people hate getting needles.

I believe this tech is mostly intended for youth, but I can also see this working well for my adult sister in law.

Dentalcare is another use case for the company. I would use it for that.

The idea is simple. Distract, distract, distract, with virtual reality powered immersion.

I’m sure that’s the same reason why every dentist office was outfitted with flatscreens as soon as they became a thing. VR just takes it to another level.

The company is called Paperplane Therapeutics; based just outside of Montreal.

I love this as an example to show young people a creative way to solve problems. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.

Understand the problem at the root cause, and then explore solutions that could address those roots.

Sometimes those solutions are sitting in your living room (you can only play Beat Saber so many times).

After all, innovation often involves combining two separate systems or technologies to create something new and improved.

Even if it is a bandaid solution 😂