(For my son)
No one asked to be here. I didn't ask to be here. You didn't ask to be here. We just appeared. And we will all expire. I don't say that to be heavy. I say it because once you really sit with it, it will hopefully free you up as it has for me. That freedom is what lets you stop making decisions out of fear and start paying attention to what you actually care about. It hasn't always worked out that way for me and likely won't for you. But the more you come back to it, the easier things get. With that in mind, I thought I'd jot down some 'career advice' for you:
"Follow your passion" is advice you'll hear a thousand times. "Be curious" is the same advice in different clothes. They're both asking you to notice what excites you. That's it. Be honest enough with yourself to register the signal.
Sometimes you'll get obsessed with something for three months and then it'll fade. Let it. During those three months you'll devour. You'll learn at a pace you can't sustain. The obsession passes, but the residue stays. Every phase of excitement leaves deposits. Those deposits compound in ways you can't predict, and the compounding is the whole game.
The thing to watch out for is indifference. The moment you stop caring about the outcome of what you're doing, move. Not necessarily to a new city or a new job. But toward something. Take a risk. Learn something unfamiliar. Try.
You'll also hit stretches where you care a lot but the progress stalls and the novelty wears off. That's different from indifference. That's the mastery dip. Indifference is numbness. The mastery dip is frustration. One is absence of signal. The other is a painful signal. Learning to tell the difference takes years. I don't know if I ever quite figured it out, but I never stopped trying. I hope you don't either.
Early on you'll follow excitement somewhat recklessly. Good. Over time you'll get better at reading your own signals. When to push through, when to pivot. This is wisdom, and it compounds like retirement savings. You can't skip to it. You have to experience a life.
Pay attention to what layer your excitement lives at
Here's something I wish someone had told me earlier: pay attention to what layer your excitement lives at.
You've seen me practice guitar. I play because I want to play music. The guitar is the vehicle. But the vehicle demands mastery. You don't skip learning the instrument. The years of practice, the frustration, the slow accumulation of skill IS the compound interest. That's how you develop taste and judgment and a deep feel for what makes music work. When I'm grinding through scales early in the morning, the thing keeping me going is the music I hear in my head, not the identity of "guitar player."
There are already tools that can generate music, write code, produce research, make art. I'm sure there will be more whenever you read this. Someone who uses one to generate a track hasn't become a musician. They got the output but skipped the knowledge. They'll never know where it matters to look because they never lived inside the craft.
Watch for three kinds of people as you grow up. People who love the music will eagerly pick up new instruments, AI included, because those tools serve the music. People whose identity is attached to one specific instrument will feel threatened when something new comes along. And people who want the output without the craft will plateau, because they never built the understanding that tells them what "good" sounds like. Try to be the first kind.
This isn't just about music. It's about anything. My work is the same way. I didn't fall in love with data science or economics. I fell in love with the questions. The data science, the economics, those are just more guitars. Whatever you end up doing, there will be a version of this. The craft and the thing the craft is in service of. Know which one is which.
Situated knowledge
You live in time and space. You touch reality. These models and machines do not.
You can ask an AI to bring in unexpected ideas, explore domains you've never been near. It'll be extraordinary at that. But it won't have stakes. It can simulate the output of someone who spent three months obsessed with a topic, but it won't have had the 2 AM realization that reframed everything. It won't have felt the frustration that forced a new approach. It won't have had the conversation with a friend that opened a door it didn't know existed.
What you build by following your excitement across different subjects is something I'd call situated knowledge. Knowledge fused with context and emotion and timing and the specific life you were living when you learned it. Each obsession leaves residue. The accumulated residue is what makes your judgment and your questions yours. No one else's. Certainly no machine's.
You will never compete with the machines on breadth of information. Don't try. What you bring is a life lived in a specific time and place, with real stakes, that shapes what questions feel urgent to you right now. A machine can explore anywhere. Only you know where it matters to look.
This is why you can't skip to the output. The craft, the struggle, the practice; these are how you build the situated knowledge that lets you ask the right questions and know when something is actually good versus merely plausible. There are no shortcuts here. You have to do the work. But the work is the point.
Other people
One more thing. Excitement is rarely something you generate alone. Think about the moments that change your direction. Most of them will start with another person. A conversation that lights something up. Watching someone do something and wanting to understand how. Feedback that stings but opens a door.
Be humble. No one has any of this figured out. Be kind. Let people be where they are. Give them grace. You didn't ask to be here and neither did they. Nobody fails at surviving, always remember that.
Humility will also make you better at using whatever tools exist when you're older. The people who use the machines best are the ones who can say "I don't know" and mean it. If you pretend to know everything, you have nothing to ask. If you're genuinely humble, you have infinite questions. And questions are leverage.
Attention
Attention is the most expensive thing you can give someone. It's the most powerful tool you have. I think it's the only one you have.
The machines that will surround you literally run on something called 'attention'. But that kind of machine attention is just math. It's allocation of compute. Nothing is attending. There's no one home deciding "this matters to me right now, given everything I'm giving up by focusing here."
Your attention is different. It's allocation of a life. Every moment you spend paying attention to something is a moment you didn't spend on everything else. That irreversibility is what gives it weight. When someone pays attention to you, they're spending something they will never get back and can never scale up. That's what makes it mean something. That's what the machines can't do.
No one asked to be here. We all just showed up. I don't know if this was the best career advice but what's a career anyways? The best thing we can do is pay attention while we're here. The career will figure itself out.