A Growing Me

What makes you feel uncomfortable and insecure about the future?

• When ChatGPT came up, while I was so impressed by how smart the bot was, I became even more stressed up and wondering what I could continue to do to create value in the future? Would my job be replaced by the bot?
• At the same time when many tech companies were/and are still announcing layoffs, many friends in the industry are feeling worried, demotivated and stressful with the uncertainty.
• Along with all the macro changes in the industry, companies are restructuring with new focuses, and individuals get easily lost in the new changes, things are ambiguous and people feel insecure too.

These feelings make us feel uncomfortable, sometimes we may even get “paralyzed” mentally, feeling blank or lost. If this feeling keeps long, people may easily get depression, have sleep problems, or run into health problems as well.

While it’s not easy to be resilient and fight through these changes. I created a little workshop within my team, to discuss about uncertainties and how we could manage them. And here’re a couple of things that we came up with:

1. Transform the thoughts of changes into opportunities. Identify what you can do to leverage the new tools/changes to pursue your passion and ride this new wave to be outstanding.
2. Connect to people and get support from peers. You may realize you’re not alone the fact itself gives you power. People are always resourceful together.
3. Knowledge is the key to make informed decisions. Set some time to sit down, learn about these tools / changes. Develop your expertise patiently.
4. Stay confident, review your past change successes or resilient stories, how you managed them, and fully believe that you can make a change.
5. Focus on the things that you can control. Identify what’s in your control and focus your attention and energy on this.

A boat would be very safe at the harbor, but it has to take risks to travel over the sea, go through storms to get a memorable experience. One of my colleagues said, we have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.

So what did I do to get over the ChatGPT and AI anxiety exactly?

1. Buy stock behind it. Since I believe in its future value so much, I would really want to be an investor of it. However OpenAI is not a publicly traded company yet, but I found Microsoft is the main investor behind it, so I bought Microsoft stock instead. (Disclaimer: this is not an investment advice). This makes me feel better to be a stock holder that when AI grows, I’m impacted positively too.
2. Learn to use it on a daily basis. I used it on my daily job to see which part of my job could be replaced, and understand it’s bottleneck. As a data analyst, ChatGPT could help me write many codes and SQL queries, which could potentially increase my efficiency significantly. When my boss gives me tasks where I don’t know how to get started, chatGPT is my best friend. For example, he asked me to bring two teams together (as we bought a new company), ChatGPT clearly told me the individual steps to get started.
3. Create ChatGPT blogs. I committed myself to be part of the testing groups, and would start a series of blogs about the usage of the tool to share with people. Here’s my first blog.
4. Join learning groups and learn use cases. There’re many online groups and communities about ChatGPT now, join some groups together and be part of it. Eventually I hope to build some products from this as well.

Feeling uncomfortable about something right now? Follow these few steps, write down your answers to these questions and let me know.

1. What changes/uncertainty that make you the most uncomfortable right now?
2. What do you think is the reason that these changes would make you feel uncomfortable?
3. Is there a past time that you had a big change, and you went through it? How did you go through it?
4. What ideas can you do to manage the current changes and uncertainties?
5. Which idea you’re going to commit to making a change?

Start taking actions and focus on the things that you can control!

Feel free to subscribe to my future updates below.