Executive coach and Cornell Tech lecturer Keith Cowing discusses the decreasing value of tasks and the increasing value of judgment and leadership in an AI-driven future.
Cornell Tech lecturer Keith Cowing explores how individuals and leaders can cultivate and teach the critical skills of judgment and leadership so we can navigate and thrive in a rapidly evolving job market and an AI-driven future.
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Chris Wofford
On this episode of Cornell Keynotes, we are joined by executive coach. Cornell Tech lecturer Keith Cowing, who discusses the decreasing value of tasks and the increasing value of judgment and leadership in an AI driven future. Keith encourages us to cultivate and learn those skills that will help us navigate and thrive in a rapidly evolving job market. Keith also stresses the importance of getting your hands dirty and just learning through curiosity and open mindedness using AI powered technology.
Chris Wofford
So be sure to check out the episode notes for links to Keith Cowan's online product management certificate programs. Listeners, here's my conversation with Keith Cowing.
Keith Cowing
I spent ten years of my career as a product manager in the tech world, and then ten years leading product teams, and I had some executive coaching along the way as I was learning how to develop my personal leadership style, how to get the best out of my team, maybe even have a little fun along the way and stay sane through all of the craziness and a lot of what I learned from there.
Keith Cowing
I really enjoyed teaching and coaching other people how to go through that journey, and so I now full time spend my time as an executive coach for CEOs and product leaders, and then working with big companies on training in various areas, much of it related to product leadership and change management as we go through huge shifts like AI.
Keith Cowing
And then with Cornell, I teach product management in the MBA program, and then also some programs like the Product and Tech Leadership one coming up in September for executive education. So that's for working professionals that are senior engineering or product leaders. And I really get a lot of joy out of it's a lot of fun. I'm a tech geek and also somebody very focused on leadership development, how to help people get the most out of their careers, and other teams.
Chris Wofford
Speaking of which, so I do love what you do as an educator. So could you tell us about the skills that from where you sit, do you think are the most critical and most valuable to us as employers, as employees or leaders in the new AI era?
Keith Cowing
Well, we're in the midst of the beginning of it. But in the midst of a huge shift where the value of knowledge alone has been going down for a while with the internet and then Google and Wikipedia and YouTube and all of these tools. Now with the latest LMS knowledge, is starting to fall off a cliff in terms of its value in and of itself.
Keith Cowing
And then rote tasks. If you're just completing a task or somebody asked you to do a specific thing and you're doing the thing and you're completing it, the value of that is going down as well is going down slowly now, and eventually it's going to go down really quickly. But the three things that I does not do is demonstrate leadership should take extremely critical judgment and then demonstrate creativity.
Keith Cowing
Original thought, original thinking, not just precedent from the past, but pushing us forward. And so between leadership, judgment, and creativity, those are the skills that most people probably spend 20% of their time today flexing those muscles and 80% of the time getting stuff done. And in a future, we need to prepare for a world where that shifts and eventually are spending 80% of our time on leadership, judgment and creativity and 20% getting stuff done because things are so much more efficient.
Keith Cowing
And that means thinking differently about how we manage teams, about how we manage our own time, about how we develop those skills and those muscles so that in the future it can be fun and productive and not scary.
Chris Wofford
Let's talk about some of the tasks I don't want to get into doomed jobs chatter here, but but I think it's instructive because all of us kind of can think about some of that, some of the tasks that we'd rather do without or some of the job functions, or frankly, some of the entire departments that we may end up doing without.
Chris Wofford
How do you how do you talk about this? People must ask you all the time. Is my job doomed?
Keith Cowing
So I'm not a doomsayer at all. I'm a realist, and an optimist is how I like to view the world. And if you look historically first at 1860, in the US, 40% of jobs were in farming. Today it's 1%. So it's changed radically. But we don't have less jobs. Jobs evolved into factory jobs. And 50 years ago, 25% of jobs were in factories.
Keith Cowing
Now it's less than ten. And so those have evolved. But we don't have less jobs. A lot of people have moved into software roles or sales roles or things that didn't exist in 1940 and 1950, and there will be further evolutions. We don't know what the next jobs are, but we know the skills are going to be different.
Keith Cowing
We have to work on those muscles. And I've been asked specifically what functions are most at risk. Is it sales? Is it engineering? Is it product management? Is it finance? And I think it's less about the function and more about your level of agency. Where I view this stack of agency or the lowest agency is somebody hands me a task and I do it the next level.
Keith Cowing
Somebody hands me a complex solution and I break it into tasks, and then I do them the next level. Someone hands me a problem and I figure out what the solution should be and then execute on it. And then the highest level is I'm actually searching for the problems myself, and I sit down with the person who I work for, that I work with and say, here are the problems that I'm seeing.
Keith Cowing
I think these three are the most important to work on and here's why. And now I'm going to develop the solution and then build on it. And so at the lowest level, if you're just sending cold emails as a salesperson, that work is in trouble. It doesn't mean that job is in trouble, but that work is in trouble.
Keith Cowing
Just like you used to have armies of people that were literally doing human calculations because there weren't calculators. You don't have people doing that, but you have plenty of people doing higher level technical work. And so I think it's you should think very carefully about the work you're doing during the day. And if it doesn't take judgment or leadership and it's just execution of a task, then that is probably not going to be valuable ten years from now.
Keith Cowing
And you need to start working on some of those new muscles. So when the world shifts, it's going to shift rapidly and you want to be ready for it. There has been a transition in education anyway over time, away from rote memorization and knowledge to skills and learning skills is still very, very valuable. And there's been a lot of work around things such as case study, discussions where you give people context and then you have intellectual debate.
Keith Cowing
You process those inputs, you think about what you would do, and you practice applying judgment in a situation, and then maybe you throw a wrench in that and say, okay, I'm going to change the rules. And now what would you do? And I'm going to change the rules again. And now what would you do? It reminds me a little bit.
Keith Cowing
I interviewed a Navy Seal one time for a role in a company, and the CEO and I were talking to him and asked, what skills do you have that would be applicable here? Because we understand how wildly skilled you are. But what how does that apply here? And he thought about it for a second. He said, I'm very skilled at making critical decisions under pressure with limited information quickly.
Keith Cowing
And I always remembered that line, even those ten years ago, because I really resonated with me were, that's a tremendously valuable skill. You're getting inputs and it's imperfect and you need to do something. And what are you going to do? And that fundamental skill, I actually don't think the pedagogy around that, how you teach and train and practice that has changed that much.
Keith Cowing
I think what has changed is that that skill is going to be more valuable, and not having that skill is going to be incredibly hurtful for people where a lot of people could get by, by just doing the tasks, and the people with exceptional judgment would rise and, and have different areas where they were, they were rewarded for it.
Keith Cowing
But I think the difference in reward for tasks versus that kind of judgment is going to get magnified. And so it's just that much more important where you need to learn the tools of AI and learn how to apply it and play with it and use it. And also you need to work on your leadership and judgment. They've always been important, but I think now they'll be more important.
Keith Cowing
And that's really different.
Chris Wofford
So in thinking about the timeliness of AI, efficiencies is the word of the day when we talk to people across all organizations. Economic conditions have led us here. Right. And efficiencies. I would venture to guess a lot of people out here in our audience probably are told to think about ways that they can improve business practices, make yourself more efficient, make your entire team or the organization more efficient.
Chris Wofford
Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that must be a that must be a theme. I'm sure it's going to come up at your product, tech and leadership program throughout.
Keith Cowing
Yeah, absolutely. So efficiency is here as a focus point and we're not getting rid of that. That's a reality and a current fact. If you rewind 3 or 4 years, people are very focused on growth and growth and growth and growth and revenue and top line. And now a lot of what people are talking about is revenue per employee, which means efficiency.
Keith Cowing
How do I not hire more people and still grow output, profits, etc.? Or how do I do more with less? Or how do I hire people? But every time I hire somebody, get that much more output. And so it really is about efficiency. And I would say I'd compare this a little bit to let's say bicycles were just invented.
Keith Cowing
And you have a ten mile commute uphill. And it's the first air of bicycles and they're steel and they're 50 pounds, and the tire goes flat once a day and you can barely stay on it. It's really a terrible experience, but you can see where it's going to go, and you need to just get on that and pedal and try it and get used to it and get used to the balance and all these things, because then the aluminum bike will come out and it'll be lighter than a carbon fiber bike will come out, it'll be even lighter.
Keith Cowing
And then one day an e-bike is going to show up and you're going to zip up that hill, and it's going to be so incredibly efficient and fun. And then the company is going to get rid of the parking lot and build a building there, and you're only going to be able to take bikes to work and parking to the bike rack.
Keith Cowing
And so you have to be ready for that day or it's going to happen suddenly, but it's going to be a little while, which means just learn how to ride the bike right now and pedal. And it's fun and it feels fantastic. And so just play around with these tools where I'll give you an example in my work.
Keith Cowing
I'm an executive coach, so I'll sit down with CEOs and product leaders and talk to them about their strategy and their vision and their relationships and their employees and their team and what they're doing. And now I've started recording those sessions, and I do it in obviously, a very confidential, privacy secure way. And then I'll take the transcript and I'll put it into a I bought in before every meeting.
Keith Cowing
I say go through my last sessions. I've met with this person eight times before. Remind me what we talked about when we very first started, what the goals are, what we talked about last, remind me the names in the stakeholders of this person's context and who they're working with. And give me a little feedback on the last session.
Keith Cowing
What I could do better as a coach, and give me some ideas for where I could go in this session. What are the lines of questioning? What are the areas we could explore and that saves me half an hour of prep before a meeting and it's the same work, but it's so much more efficient. So now I have a couple of those a day.
Keith Cowing
I save an hour a day that's an hour I can be more effective or an hour I can do something else and I can have more fun. And that feels great. So I'm just learning the tools. I'm just pedaling on the bike. And then some day, when things need to be ten times as efficient, I'll be ready for that because I played with the tools and I've seen how they work, and so I highly recommend people just go out there and start pedaling and apply this in your job right now.
Keith Cowing
It doesn't have to be that hard, and it can be pretty fun.
Chris Wofford
What are other ways that we can get our hands dirty and just kind of dig in? Keith. And if you want to even get specific, like what kind of platforms do you think would be a good entry level type thing to get to, to start getting your hands dirty and preparing us to then really learn about this?
Keith Cowing
Yeah. So there's a lot of tools out there so it can feel overwhelming, but I wouldn't worry about trying to worry about all of the tools. I would just pick a couple that are relevant to you and your work. And so two easy things you can do. One is change your homepage from Google or whatever you have it on today to ChatGPT or Clyde from anthropic, which a lot of people are having good luck with, or perplexity, which is an AI based search engine, which is really interesting to see how that works.
Keith Cowing
And in terms of doing research and certain workflows, and each of them have a free version, or you can pay about $20 a month for a souped up professional version. Change your home page to one of those and just use it on a daily basis so that you start to get a sense for where it's amazing and saves you time and where it wastes your time, and that's where your judgment comes into play.
Keith Cowing
I use some of these tools to give me suggestions on coaching, and I throw some of them out, and I keep some of them because I'm still applying my judgment, but I'm using it to accelerate the process. And those are some of the ones I use fireflies for recording meetings. And then looking at the notes after. And I've been using Claude, I've been using ChatGPT, and then everybody has some tools that are probably relevant for their specific area.
Keith Cowing
We were talking before this about descript, which is a platform for podcasting, and that has AI built into it. I've been playing with that because I'm launching a podcast, and so I think it's nice to use a tool that specific to your area. And then also use some of the tools that are generic. And so try one that's specific, try one workflow that helps you and then change your homepage.
Keith Cowing
And for 30 days just try using it once a day. Now you'll learn a lot and you'll have some fun, and maybe you'll even save some time.
Chris Wofford
Talia asks with the increase, the increase in productivity with the computer age and potential for increased work productivity with AI. Do you see this resulting in changes to the 40 hour workweek? The five day workweek model? Second part to my question, Keith. And you can hit this any way you like. Can, but maybe we should take a trip in time and talk about automation.
Chris Wofford
When we met the other day, we were talking about the history of automation and what it is kind of meant through other similarly disruptive periods in our history. And can you talk about those two things right there?
Keith Cowing
Yeah. So there's one aspect of this, I think when it comes to leadership, we talked about judgment, creativity, leadership when it comes to leadership, one of the biggest things that I focus with people on is how do you balance confidence so that you can inspire people in that direction with humility and knowing that you can't predict everything in the future?
Keith Cowing
Because if you try to predict the future perfectly, then you're kind of giving up the fact that you don't know what you're talking about, because nobody can do that. And so you have to be very careful. And these types of scenarios, I think there's a few different ways it could go. Historically, we've had automation, yet with a lot of these new digital tools and being connected all the time, it led to people with more working hours, especially more working hours per household.
Keith Cowing
Now, if you think about it that way and being on all the time and so like flexibility yet never unplugging is like this weird dynamic that we've gotten stuck in. I certainly do think that there are opportunities, if we apply leadership correctly, so that we can use this productivity enhancement to give ourselves better lifestyles. Meaning, just this morning, I was talking with somebody about them applying AI to their business intelligence.
Keith Cowing
So it's when you run reports on your finances and your numbers and, and there are large companies doing billions in revenue, and they have all these questions from the CEO or the CFO on a daily basis of, well, let me see what this is doing in Japan and let me see this cohort and how financials have changed in this way and that way.
Keith Cowing
And when you take something like that and you put it in AI and you say, all of our data is hooked up here, and here's a chatbot and you can ask it 24 seven all the questions you want and you don't have to bother me because I created it once for you. And now you can have at it.
Keith Cowing
That will give you the freedom to not be so reactive and then be more proactive. And so that's an area where I think the 40 hour workweek, I just I'm blown up already. But both for good and bad, you're not tied to your seat for 40 hours in the office per se, but you're probably working more than 40 hours, and you're certainly have a mental overload of getting pinged for more than 40 hours a week.
Keith Cowing
And so I think there's an opportunity for leaders to apply it correctly and use this to be more efficient for things that they want in a snappy way, such that folks can be more focused on proactive, creative work where they're applying their judgment, and that can be better for everybody. But if leaders use it in the wrong way, then I think it's actually going the opposite direction, too.
Keith Cowing
I think it is extremely valuable and maybe more rare than we want to admit as humans, to truly have the ability to process a whole bunch of information and exert independent thinking, but truly come up with your own idea and what you think and decision making under various pressures and information is hard, both judgment and leadership, because it's the behavior that follows the judgment that frequently matters.
Keith Cowing
I'll give you an example. When I was at Flatiron Health as a VP there, we had Gokul Rajaram, who's an incredible leader, and he was a leader at caviar and then square, and he's on the boards of some major companies and an investor. He came in and gave us some training on decision making, and he has a YouTube video on it and he calls it the spade framework.
Keith Cowing
So spade and he walked us through this where when you're making a decision, sit down first and ask is for the setting. So what is the specific decision that you're actually making? And sometimes people are not nearly as clear on that as they think. Are you saying what international markets should we go into? Are you saying we've decided to go international and we're going to choose which three are you deciding if you should even go international at all?
Keith Cowing
Is that the wrong framing? And what you're saying is we need a growth investment and it could be international on our same product, or it could be a new product in our current market. And how do you define the question and the setting? And then the P is for the people supporting the right people at the right time, who needs to provide input and who's the actual decider and the decision maker, and who needs to be informed about it.
Keith Cowing
And then the A is for the alternatives. You write down the specific paths that you could take. You can actually stop there. This is the decision. These are the people. These are the inputs and these are the alternatives. And then at square they would actually share that with the whole company and say we are telegraphing this is a decision that we're about to make.
Keith Cowing
And this is how we're going to make that decision, which in terms of training, IT training and teaching is a great way to teach other people by pulling you essentially virtually into the room to say, we're making this decision and this is how we make our decisions. And you can see the process and we're showing it to you.
Keith Cowing
And then you'd come back and say, okay, we took two weeks. We got all the inputs we said we were going to get. If you thought we were missing anything in terms of inputs, that was your chance and we could get it. And now let's actually do the D which is decide and E which is execute and roll it out.
Keith Cowing
And that process I thought was a great way to think about using judgment and this holistic way to process information, apply independent thinking here. Everybody truly listen, but then make your own call. And I think one thing that's interesting, in a world that's going more zoom and less in person, is that a lot of what I learned when I was 22 was literally just being in the room, and maybe I didn't deserve to be in that room, but people didn't care if some folks sat in the back and just listened.
Keith Cowing
And just being a sponge and watching how people behave and lead and manage was really, really valuable for me. In a zoom based world, when you have six, eight people on a meeting, maybe you don't invite those extra five because it gets hard to manage and noisy. And so as a leader, demonstrating how you think and how you make judgment can be really, really helpful by helping people virtually be in the room when they don't have as many of those opportunities, naturally, that maybe they used to in a purely in-person world.
Keith Cowing
I remember when I was at LinkedIn from 2012 to 2014, that was when mobile started dominating, and during that time window it passed 50% of usage on mobile and LinkedIn started with a little mobile group where those anybody in the company that new iOS and Android was in that little group because that's all there was. And then they started training the rest of the company on mobile, and then eventually every engineer in the company that was doing some kind of front end work had to understand mobile, and every group did mobile and mobile wasn't a group anymore.
Keith Cowing
It was just part of reality and it was everywhere. But there was an evolution. It actually went through it pretty quickly because once mobile hit that park where the iPhone was out and then the App Store was out, and then the 3G iPhone, and then all of a sudden things took off really fast. I see something similar where they are right now.
Keith Cowing
It's probably a little group of experts that are figuring out all of the stuff, and then evangelizing and training the rest of the company, and then eventually you'll just be in everything. But you have to start somewhere. You have to create an environment where you can empower your team to use it and to experiment with it. And I think it's going to push our boundaries on how we handle risk and how we think about risk taking.
Keith Cowing
Because technology used to be a deterministic thing. You told it to do something and it did that unless there was a bug and then the bug that fixed and now you ask it to do something and it acts more like a human, where it gives you something where the output is going to be different every time. And learning how to manage that is actually a different process, because you got to get out of this command and control mindset, and you have to facilitate an environment by which cool things can come out, but you can't predict it.
Keith Cowing
You can't perfectly control it either. And so learning that muscle and skill is a leadership team and as an employee is incredibly important. And that's a lot of what we'll be doing over the two days, is bringing all these brilliant folks together that are literally going through these transformations right now in their companies. And for one, sharing some cutting edge research on AI from Cornell faculty, for one, doing some content about how do you think about how to get the most out of yourself as a leader in terms of your personal leadership style and how to get the most out of your team?
Keith Cowing
And then also as a leader, how do you foster the environment where your people can learn this stuff rapidly and be successful? And it's got to come from the leadership, and you have to facilitate an environment where people can learn and teach and grow altogether. And the leaders have to admit that they don't have all of the answers, but they can have confidence in the process by which they facilitate an environment where the company learns and teaches itself and evolves and grows, and that requires that balance of humility and confidence to set direction.
Keith Cowing
Yet know that you don't have all of the answers and you'll evolve with it. And when you look at the areas. Mobile 2007 the iPhone came out. 2008. The App Store came out. 2006 was Amazon EC2 really the beginning of cloud? But I think you have to go back probably to 99 and the internet era until you had something of the magnitude that this is, and maybe even more towards automation in factories.
Keith Cowing
And in 99 it was changing the world and it was a bubble at the same time. They were both true. And so a whole bunch of things fell apart because money was just burned and thrown off the roof. But the internet also changed everything. And so it's not one or the other. There's probably some crazy stuff happening yet.
Keith Cowing
It's going to change everything at the same time. And so just because there's some wild activity doesn't mean that it isn't also a fundamental shift that we all want to be aware of and start to get into it with. Maybe think about companies in the early 2000 that were getting on the internet and having websites and learning how to sell on e-commerce and stuff like that, just building that muscle, just starting to learn how to ride the bike and all.
Keith Cowing
We have to think about legal different and compliance different and privacy different and skills training different. And I need to give the guardrails to my employees so they know how to abide by our practices, yet be creative at the same time. That's what's really going to over time. When that turning point really hits me that you as an organization are ready for it.
Chris Wofford
Exactly. Get the reps in, ride the bike. I want to shift gears a little bit. You mentioned privacy, and there's been some some chatter among our audience related to kind of confidentiality. And Natalie pops things up but says, I want to reiterate the question about confidentiality. What kind of precautions should we take? We're trying to use AI and input our data or client data into it.
Chris Wofford
We haven't talked about privacy too much, but leaders must think about this all the time.
Keith Cowing
Yeah, absolutely. And that's where let's say you have a well a team or some group that's looking at it. I think you have to make it some of these jobs, some responsibility to think about this and how it applies to your company. And luckily there's a lot of different options here. So you can how is this all on your own and use open source models and control it?
Keith Cowing
A lot of companies are doing that. You can use API services and have data outside your building. And do that and look at the terms and conditions and decide where your comfort level is. And so there is an option for everybody. A lot of what I see right now is the best companies are actually using multiple models at the same time, and they're using different ones for different scenarios.
Keith Cowing
And so they may use ChatGPT and in some situations, but then have some areas where they decide they're going to use llama on these open source models and do it on their own infrastructure, in their own environment and contain it. And so again, you can have multiple options. There are definitely ways with terms and conditions that you can manage privacy, even with the big companies and big models and APIs.
Keith Cowing
Yet because the technology is early enough, you have to be aware that there's some risk in anything. And so being able to define as a company where your risk tolerance is and why you're making those decisions comes back to that judgment, right. Whoever's leading that effort has serious judgment and serious responsibility, yet can also set the guidelines so that everybody else can can run quickly.
Keith Cowing
If everybody's sitting there thinking, well, how do I deal with privacy, then you're not going to be creative. And if you have a team that's that's manage the privacy and says, here's the guardrails within this, you're fine, then just ride your bike on the turf field. And during the day when it's not dark out, you're going to be fine.
Keith Cowing
You fall over. Not a big deal. It's contained for now.
Chris Wofford
How do you get an entire organization up to speed?
Keith Cowing
I see a lot of different tactics. I think one of the most important ones is actually less forced, slightly structured environments where people facing similar problems but at very different companies can share ideas. And that was one of the principles of our program. But if you look at that broadly there, if you have CTO issues, bringing a bunch of CTOs together and one person works in industrial gases and one person works in an AI company and one person works in a retail company, and there's some things that are very similar and some things that are very different, and you can learn a lot from that.
Keith Cowing
I think it's not having a guidebook that says, we're going to teach you these ten things and more. We're going to foster an environment where there are certain principles that we want you to take in, but we're also just going to share our learning experiences with each other. I think it's much more collaborative right now because we're defining what the future looks like and finding people that have similar problems but from different environments and bringing them together is really important.
Chris Wofford
Alex asks, what prevents AI moving from just preparation to actually managing meetings with speech generation or virtual personas? It can also mine info in parallel with the session to make discussion more effectively. So let's talk about live facilitation of a meeting via AI. Anybody doing anything like this?
Keith Cowing
Well, so I had a discussion this morning that's not exactly on that, but it's a similar topic. And the short answer with a lot of these is going to be like, if this was live and we're talking in a coffee shop, I'd be like, what do you think? Tell me, because I think that would be fascinating. And like, you bounce ideas off each other and you can imagine a future if you constrain your imagination.
Keith Cowing
That's when we're going to get short sighted here. And so I don't want to constrain imagination in any direction. And I don't think it's exactly what that was. But this morning there was a conversation, and we were talking about performance reviews and things like that. And like, maybe you could have an AI bought go and talk to people and, and and gather some information and, and sit down with the manager and get their feedback on employees and then summarize it and just it's really hard to give feedback.
Keith Cowing
And a lot of times people overthink and annual performance reviews, and instead of sitting down on an annual basis and making a huge deal about it and stressing about it and writing about it, what if an AI just came and knocked on your door and said, I need ten minutes? Like, tell me about how this project went. Tell me about how this project went.
Keith Cowing
Tell me about how that project went. And then I went back and just summarized it all and just gave it to the employee and said, hey, here's the feedback. Like simple. And it took 30 minutes of your time instead of like two weeks of stress. And so I think there are some areas where that definitely could happen and people are experimenting with it.
Keith Cowing
And this is an area where pushing the boundaries of this, where it's not quite possible today, but if you try it and you see where it fails and why, then in a year when all of a sudden all the models change again and they're radically better, you might be like, that's the unlock now it's possible. And then you can pull it in because those limitations have been overcome.
Keith Cowing
The very beginning it was cost. It was so expensive to run these queries. And then the price went down 90% and a really short period of time. Oh, now it's unlocked. And so anything you assume today, I think it's really important to think through why it works or why it doesn't. Because that may change very, very quickly. We're in an environment where you have to revisit your assumptions faster than I think you ever had to before, because maybe it's possible now where it wasn't six months ago and so I could see a world if you're kind of pushing the boundaries.
Keith Cowing
I haven't seen AI work yet, but I could see a world in the fairly near future where I could have a good data conversation and how people stop from interrupting each other and make sure everybody gets a chance to speak. And hey, Chris, we haven't heard from you. I know you have some brilliant ideas in this area. Like, do you have anything to add to the conversation before we wrap?
Keith Cowing
That's a good human behavior, but if I can do it, then maybe I can catch you when you forget to do that.
Chris Wofford
So the idea is get out there, get your hands dirty. Any other any other sort of tips or words of inspiration to kind of get us going?
Keith Cowing
My personality type, I'm a perfectionist and so I love thinking about things. And like if I have any sort of weaknesses I have to manage, one of them is maybe overthink something. And so this is just like reduce the stress and just do something because it's so much better than doing nothing. And so a lot of people are overthinking it of like, what should I do?
Keith Cowing
And I don't know how to learn about AI and like, oh, just change your Google homepage to Perplexity or Cloud or ChatGPT and guess what? I don't care which one. Just do one of them and do all three and go out there and just exercise that muscle and learn, because then all of a sudden it builds on itself and you adapt faster than you realize.
Keith Cowing
Once you get over the blank page problem of where do I start? So just start and just go. I was at the beach over the weekend playing football with my son, and the next day I was incredibly sore and like weird areas of my calves and stuff like that because I'm not used to running in the sand. So anybody who's done a sport and done a new sport or a new weightlifting routine or whatever it is that they haven't done in the past, and they have this soreness and all these muscles you never really know existed.
Keith Cowing
And because your body wasn't used to that, but then you do it for a week and you adapt pretty quickly. And so same thing with I just go out there and try the new sport, and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can shift your behavior to think of that first. And when you think of it first, that's going to help you over the next years.
Keith Cowing
I think you're plenty of time, so just get started. But then when that moment comes in, it's a radically fast shift. You'll be ready for it because you know how to ride the bike.
Chris Wofford
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