Start meeting more people: Salvaging your career in a GenAI world

How to plan for a future when nothing is known about the future?

Jessica Livingston recently gave a very short commencement speech at a college which everyone should listen to.

Jessica is a cofounder of YCombinator, one of the top startup accelerators in the world, and YCombinator is one of the few companies which probably has a better understanding of how the world will change because of Gen AI.

Here, Jessica is talking to fresh graduates who have a brand new career ahead of them, and how to navigate an uncertain future in the real world. But I just realized that we are all now like fresh graduates; ChatGPT will change the world profoundly but nobody knows the details. Nobody knows which professions remain relatively unmolested, which ones will be mangled beyond recognition, and which ones will die out altogether. So, Jessica’s advice applies to us all.

Here's one relevant paragraph:

Ok, then what? How do you search through thousands of options? To be honest, you can’t. You have to use some kind of trick for narrowing them down. My favorite trick is people. Talk to people. Get introduced to new people. Find the people that you think are interesting, and then ask what they're working on. And if you find yourself working at a place where you don't like the people, get out.

I have written previously about the importance of networking and for those who don’t know how to network, I’ve some suggestions in a follow-up article. Those were written pre-ChatGPT but their importance has only increased. When all knowledge is available from ChatGPT o3 in 30 seconds, the importance of what you know (degrees and credentials) will decrease, and the importance of who you know (your network), and who knows you (your personal brand) will increase.

One of the reasons I started Pune Knowledge on Tap was as an excuse to meet interesting people, in response to the realisation in the previous paragraph.

What are you doing to increase your network and personal brand?