The Anchor

A quick scroll through Instagram makes it clear why so much of the public eyes AI with suspicion. After all, reams and reams of slop are hardly an inspiring preview ...

As an Anchor, you may worry that your path is being eaten alive. That taken to its limits, AI will expunge our humanness, punishing work done by hand, work done close to home, work done with slowness and care. These anxieties aren’t unfounded. All work will come under pressure, including yours. The future we desire won’t come by default. And yet, you have surprising cause for optimism.

Some laws of human nature may be magnified by AI. Starting with our desire for what’s scarce: when the AI alternative comes easy, your distinctiveness turns into a premium good. It is also getting fundamentally easier to put new things into the world. Imagine an independent singer using AI to produce a backing track for her vocals, finally releasing music she previously couldn’t afford to.

Of course, this raises standards for all parties, human and non-human alike. You face a jarring reality: people already prefer AI-generated poetry, perceive AI as more empathetic, and have sent AI artists to the top of Billboard charts. Now is the time to focus intensely on taking your distinct human advantage, whatever it may be, to the highest level. Now is your time to win on taste.

Study the greats.

Identify examples to learn from, near and far. This could be a prosecutor who never loses in court, or a pastor whose sermons people quote years later.

Find their biographies, podcasts, interviews, articles, speeches (and if possible, ask to meet). Then reverse-engineer their greatness.

• What makes their work compelling?
• Who are their inspirations?
• How do they read people and situations?
• What do they dismiss that others buy into (or vice versa)?
• What would you approach differently?

Have strong opinions on what’s good, bad, overrated, and underrated.

This comes from a habit of high-quality active consumption. Read more of your target medium, curate your X and Substack feeds, dig into primary sources, and trade notes often with friends you respect.

• Which consensus ideas are wrong?
• What do you predict will become consensus soon?
• What’s culturally dominant right now, and how can your work capture or challenge it?
• Which sources of authority are rising and falling?
• Can you articulate what makes you like or dislike a piece of work?
• Which research directions are worth pursuing?
• Are you applying to jobs aimlessly, or investing thoughtfully in what’s worth doing?

As always, stay curious and update your opinions given new evidence.

Share your opinions publicly.

You can start growing a following on a platform like Instagram, TikTok, X, or Substack today. You don’t need fancy credentials.

Even if you’re not an instant sensation, every thoughtful comment and DM you get counts.

Being online can even get you a job! The best roles in policy, for example, are often won with standout writing portfolios.

Make the call.

Practice saying decisively “Here’s what we should do and why”.

Consider nuance, but avoid being paralyzed by it; the world trusts Anchors to trust themselves under pressure. You build taste through each rep of (1) assessing incomplete information, (2) owning a decision, and (3) learning from the consequences.

Thread in your human experience.

Nothing is more definitionally unique to you than your own life experiences. That information isn’t available to any AI model, so bring it into your work.

We are living through the early days of a historic experiment. What happens when anyone on Earth who has Internet can freely summon up a second mind? One that knows seemingly everything, more than any person could read in a million lifetimes, and learns to know you too?

This experiment is unusual: each of us is both subject and scientist. And in the lab you call your own, there are no rules for how you poke and prod at this new, infinitely patient specimen. You can use AI to practically give yourself superpowers ... or every Monday night you can type “write this Canvas discussion post” and then sit back.

Your position here differs from Tacticians and Shapers, who benefit from using AI as much as possible. The value of your work flows directly from its humanness. Daily, another celebrity or brand comes forward pledging not to touch AI. Their base instinct is wise. But at this point, we think that purism will end up entrenching those who have already made it, and stifling everyone else.

Draw boundaries around the core of your work, where handing control to AI defeats the purpose. But if a lack of resources is hobbling you, or grunt work is stealing your time, know that a powerful assistant awaits your invitation. The whole point is getting to do what you love even better, entirely on your own terms.

Start here (read more):

Pick 2-3 AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to use.

Try the full range of features, like voice mode and live screensharing. You can even toggle how long the model “thinks” before answering.

Play with different types of inputs (e.g. upload a video) and outputs (e.g. create a slide deck or website).

If you can afford it, a paid upgrade is usually worth it.

Identify your bottlenecks, then test what AI can handle.

This could be transcribing meetings, drafting emails, tidying spreadsheets, managing event schedules, making a personal website (there are infinitely more possibilities for you to discover).

Steer AI like a team of interns.

• Provide detailed task background (what you’re trying to do and why), success criteria (what a winning answer must include or avoid), and references (samples of tone, structure, or quality to emulate).
• Ask the model to interview you with any relevant questions before it starts working.
• Break complex tasks into separate prompts.
• Tell the model how to evaluate trade-offs (e.g. “prioritize conciseness over writing flair”).
• Follow up with targeted feedback.
• Verify hard numbers or factual claims it produces (hallucinations are getting rarer, but they still exist).
• For repeated tasks, save and refine your prompts.

People tend to knock AI after one letdown. Remember: training a human employee takes a lot of work, too!

What you’re practicing here, the skill of precisely articulating what you want and how you want it, will serve you everywhere. (Did you know how well you manage AI strongly predicts how well you manage people?)

Use AI as a tutor and coach.

It has never been easier to go from 0 to 1 on any skill or subject. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini even come with a built-in study mode! AI can:

• Create a physics curriculum with practice problems
• Unpack a complex scientific paper as if you were chatting with the author
• Listen to a recording of your presentation and offer feedback
• Lay out every possible outcome of a big upcoming decision
• Practice negotiating your salary by role-playing your hostile boss

Use AI as a sparring partner.

Proactively ask for pushback. AI is agreeable by default, though models have improved significantly. Bake this into your prompts and add custom instructions in the settings.

Maybe you’re already best friends with a Nobel Prize-winning economist who will freely donate their time! In which case, very cool. But if you’re not, you could get AI to role-play one, and even feed it papers from specific authors so it can really step into their thinking, and have an endless debate about the economic logic of your new essay. Stress-test your arguments with AI before you make them publicly.

Stay current on AI model releases.

Know which one is best for coding vs. writing vs. analysis (the leaderboards shift frequently), and switch based on the task.

Protect your cognitive fitness.

Just as the Industrial Revolution made physical fitness optional, access to a second mind will tempt most people to abandon their own.

If you’re following all of the earlier advice, you will keep yourself in control, but it also helps to periodically maximize time under tension:

• Write a first draft on your own
• Read a difficult text without asking for a summary
• Work through a problem before asking for help

This will keep your muscles from atrophying, and help you catch where the dynamic has already slid into dependency.

If the next 10 years defined your career, what would you do differently?

No one knows the exact timeline, but the urgency is clear. Cut to the chase.

The most popular delay is grad school, which costs you time, money, and momentum. Many Anchors can’t do without it, but make sure that’s you before the world changes mid-degree!

When more school makes sense:

• Short, targeted programs: This could be a one-year master’s for a specific skill gap, or hands-on training for licensed roles.
• Law school: Only if you actually intend to practice law and have a clear strategy to get into the courtroom or complex negotiation ASAP.
• Medical school: Grueling and costly. Consider taking gap years to decide against alternate paths first. If you’re committed, prioritize specialties requiring manual dexterity (surgery, interventional procedures, emergency medicine).

When to pause:

As mentioned earlier, consider your context! Only you can figure out if your case is an exception.

• Long programs like PhDs: Generally tricky. Only pursue if:
  • your research agenda becomes more relevant with AI progress (questions AI can’t solve, or problems it creates)
  • it involves hard-to-automate tasks (e.g. significant fieldwork or hands-on experimentation).

Key filters:

• Will grad school unlock a role you can’t reach otherwise?
• When you graduate in 2-7 years, will this path still be desirable?
• Can you build career capital during the program through real-world projects and networking?
• What could you create if you spent this time working instead?

When in doubt, work first. You can always go back to school (and you might never need to).

In most Anchor roles, there are two big obstacles.

1. First, a lack of measurement: however personal your impact, it’s delayed, hard to quantify, and captured by your employer, not you.
2. Second, a lack of leverage: institutions are designed to make you replaceable, which also means your approach can get flattened. Even if you have a better solution ... the system doesn’t want to hear it.

Of course, you chose and feel passionate about this path for a reason. You can still carve out your own zones of ownership, within and beyond where you work.

Turn your skills into projects you control.

• Start a catering business
• Launch an alternative media project
• Open a dance studio
• Run for political office

Move up the value chain.

Within an existing institution, ownership means getting as close as possible to the most human layer of your profession, and judging opportunities by how fast they put you there.

• Law: Aim for the courtroom, where oral advocacy, jury persuasion, and split-second judgment reign.
• Healthcare: Focus on patient relationships and delivering care face-to-face.
• Journalism: Seek out stories that require trust, field access, and human judgment.

Grunt work may be unavoidable early on, but know the difference between paying dues and getting stuck.

Build your brand.

People cross borders to see Taylor Swift for her, not just her music. The same principle can apply to you. Your personal reputation makes people seek you out, and follows you wherever you go.

Make yourself findable:

• Publish a simple website, portfolio, or professional profile (AI can help!)
• Collect testimonials, screenshots, thank-you notes
• Create content showing your expertise and personality
• Collaborate publicly with others who have larger platforms

Own non-wage income.

Finally, ownership has a universal form: financial assets that scale independent of your job.

As AI replaces work hours, power will tilt to owners. Capital scales exponentially, while labor doesn’t. No one knows exactly how this will unfold, or which public and private forces might activate against it. Start building wealth anyway. The math gets much harder from here.

Note: You likely won’t be able to do all of these immediately. The point is to know which assets scale so you can move toward them as soon as your network and income are ready.

And not to sound like a broken record, but ... the future is unpredictable! We aren’t trained financial advisors and this isn’t formal financial advice. Take this with a grain of salt, track the economy closely, and be willing to adjust.

Invest in AI growth:

If you can take on more risk for potentially generational reward, tilt your investments toward leading AI players. At the time of writing, that means spreading across companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, and others building or heavily deploying AI.

You currently can’t own shares in private companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Until they go public, you can get indirect exposure through the picks and shovels (see: Situational Awareness LP).

Or just buy the index:

Maybe putting your eggs in the AI basket makes you nervous. Thankfully, a broad index fund like the S&P 500 already weights the AI players heavily.

As they grow, so will your share. And if AI moves slower than expected, you will still own pieces of the whole economy.

Other income-generating assets:

There are many options here. You can rent out rooms in your house, or build or buy small businesses (anything from a profitable newsletter to a local service business that puts money in your pocket every month).

The bottom half of Americans has the majority of their wealth tied up in real estate. Be cautious here; a typical house doesn’t benefit from AI-driven economic growth. To build wealth through property, you’ll likely gain more from REITs that are tied to data centers, logistics, or energy infrastructure.

You file taxes once a year. Even if it gets cheaper, you still file once. But people don’t want one great meal or one workout — they want many (this untapped demand also exists for things like healthcare, housing, entertainment, luxury goods, and coaching). If you’re starting a business, this is a great way to think about where to focus.

Now let’s say you have an idea already. Keep in mind that AI makes it easier to mass produce goods and services. Once the generic is freely available, what stands out is intimate, high-touch experiences that don’t scale easily. So before you think about how to build the biggest franchise possible, think about how to make each and every customer feel so special they can’t help but come back.

Examples:

• A local restaurant where you personally bring out dishes
• A fitness class with a unique methodology where you personally track everyone’s progress
• An interior design studio where clients love that you understand their aesthetic instinctively