Tag: career advice

You’re Not Choosing Your Whole Life This Year – A Graduation Message

Graduation has a way of making ordinary questions feel enormous.

What are you going to do next? Where are you going to school? What trade are you going into? Where are you going to work? What are you going to do with your life?

That last question is the one that sneaks into our subconscious. It turns our celebration into a test. It makes a young person feel like their next decision carries the weight of the next fifty years.

Trust me. It doesn’t.

You’re not choosing your whole life this year. You’re choosing the next step.

That next step still deserves careful thought. Some choices will open doors; others will close them…and some will make the road harder than it needs to be.

But don’t hand this one decision more power than it deserves.

Your first job isn’t a life sentence. Your major isn’t your permanent identity. Your first trade, internship, military assignment, certification, apprenticeship, or business idea marks where the road begins, not where it ends.

Most lives travel roads we couldn’t have mapped in advance. One small opportunity today may connect you to a person who changes your direction entirely. One ordinary job may teach you something that becomes useful ten years later. A disappointment may save you from staying on the wrong road for too long.

You may move around. You might take a job that makes sense now and later discover it doesn’t fit who you are or what your life requires. Your priorities will change. The economy will change. A job can be a great opportunity, but it is rarely a lifetime guarantee.

Employers may invest in you when you serve their needs and (fairly or unfairly) move on when they believe you no longer do. Doors may close for reasons having little to do with your effort or character. That doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re living in a world that keeps moving. Knowing that can help you walk into each opportunity with your eyes open.

Character, hard work, and skills all carry weight, but many opportunities come through people. The people who trust you, teach you, recommend you, challenge you, and remember how you treated them may influence your future in ways no resume ever could.

Build your life on something stronger than the assumption that one company, one industry, one credential, or one carefully written plan will carry you safely from here to retirement.

Learn how to add value. That phrase sounds like a business platitude, but strip away the jargon and it’s the oldest human question. Can people count on you for something real?

Can you solve a problem? Can you make something better? Can you be trusted with responsibility? Can you communicate clearly? Can you tell the truth when it would be easier to hide? Can you learn something new without treating the need to learn as an insult?

Can you help the people around you succeed? Can you walk into a messy situation and leave it better than you found it?

People who can do these things will usually find a way forward. Maybe not on the exact timeline they imagined. But useful, trustworthy, curious, steady people tend to create options for themselves over time.

Graduates hear a lot about jobs, majors, trades, degrees, salaries, and careers. All are serious things, and they deserve real thought. It’s good to learn skills. It’s good to earn your living and eventually support a family if that becomes part of your life. It’s good to contribute useful work to the world.

But your career isn’t your whole life.

A great resume with a lonely heart is still a lonely life. A strong paycheck with shallow relationships won’t feel as rich as you think it will.

A respected title can’t sit with you at the kitchen table. It won’t laugh with you around a campfire. It can’t pray for you, forgive you, challenge you, remember old stories with you, or show up when things are going wrong.

Much of your deepest joy will come from the relationships you cultivate. The people you love. The people who love you. The friends who walk with you. The family you stay connected to. The conversations you remember years later. The long drives. The late night talks.

The unexpected kindness. The forgiveness given and received.

By the time you graduate, you may already know some of the people who will still be part of your life fifty years from now. You won’t know which ones yet. Some will drift away. Some will surprise you and stay.

And after graduation, you’ll meet more. Pay attention. One may become your spouse. Some will teach you. Some will test you. Some will need your help. Some may help save you from yourself.

The world will ask what you do. But life will eventually ask better questions.

Who do you love? Who can count on you? Who tells you the truth? Who do you encourage? Who do you forgive? Who have you helped carry a burden they couldn’t carry alone? What are you doing with your soul?

These questions will stay with you long after the name of your first employer has faded into the background.

Choose the school, the job, the trade, the service path, or the next assignment with as much wisdom as you can gather. Ask questions. Do research. Talk to people who have walked farther down the road.

Listen to your parents, even when you think they don’t fully understand the world you’re entering. They may not understand every tool or pressure you face, but they know more than you think about disappointment, responsibility, sacrifice, and love.

Then move.

Do the work in front of you. Show up on time (which is 15 minutes early). Tell the truth. Be easy to trust. Learn the tools. Respect the people. Ask better questions. Pay attention to what gives you energy and what drains it. Notice where your abilities meet someone else’s needs. Be willing to change direction without turning that change into a personal crisis.

A wise life is rarely built from one perfect decision made at eighteen or twenty-two. It’s built from thousands of smaller decisions made over time. Some will be mistakes and that’s part of the deal.

The goal isn’t to live without mistakes. It’s to tell the truth when they happen, learn what they have to teach, repair what you can, and keep walking with a little more knowledge than before.

Graduation is worth celebrating. You finished something difficult, and finishing should be honored. Enjoy the moment. Thank the people who helped you get here.

Then take a deep breath.

You don’t have to solve your whole life before the celebration is over. You won’t know every turn, every job, every friendship, every disappointment, or every joy waiting along the way.

You have enough to take the next step with care, humility, gratitude, and hope, trusting that life will teach you more as you walk.

Photo by Carson Vara on Unsplash

A Parable for Anyone Thinking About AI and Their Future

Let me tell you a story about a foosball player.

Not the person gripping the handles. Not the people leaning over the table. Not the ones watching from the side, reacting to every near miss and lucky bounce.

I mean the little player on the rod.

The one fixed in place. The one locked into one line. The one who can slide back and forth, but only so far. The one who can affect the game, but only if the ball comes close enough to matter.

They don’t choose the strategy. They don’t choose the timing. They don’t choose the pace.

Most of the time, they wait.

Then the ball comes their way, and suddenly everything matters. Angle. Timing. Readiness. Contact.

That sounds a little like work to me.

A lot of people spend their days in roles that aren’t all that different. They work inside boundaries they didn’t create. They carry responsibility inside systems they don’t control. They try to do their part well, even when they can’t see the whole field or understand everything that sent the work their way.

They may not know the whole game, or how the score is being kept. They may not even know what happened two lines back that sent the ball in their direction.

Still, when it reaches them, their moment is real.

There’s something important in that.

We don’t need to control the whole table to be responsible for our part of the play. We don’t have that kind of control in most of life. We’re asked something simpler and harder. Be ready. Pay attention. Do the best you can with what reaches you.

That alone is worth contemplating.

But what if we add artificial intelligence to the picture?

Imagine that same foosball player being given access to a system that sees patterns faster. A system that recognizes angles sooner. A system that can suggest where the ball is likely to go before the player fully sees it unfold.

At first, that sounds like help. And often it is.

The player reacts faster. The contact gets cleaner. The scoring chances improve.

AI helps people create faster, sort faster, summarize faster, and respond faster. It removes friction. It can make a capable person more effective inside the lane they’ve always occupied.

That is the promising side of it.

But there is also an uncomfortable part.

Once the system starts seeing faster and suggesting more accurately, someone above the table is eventually going to wonder why they still need the player. That question doesn’t always get asked out loud. But it’s there. You can feel it. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it go away.

That unease is legitimate.

The question is what to do with it.

Here’s where I think the real work begins.

What separates a great foosball player from an automated one isn’t reaction time. Machines will win that contest.

The deeper difference is harder to name. Knowing when not to take the obvious shot. Recognizing that the ball coming from a certain direction is a trap, not an opportunity. Sensing that something is off and adjusting before the moment fully reveals why. Coordinating with the players on the other rods in ways that don’t require a word.

That’s judgment. That’s situational awareness. That’s the kind of thing that lives in the player, not the system.

AI can help with speed. It can help with prediction. It can surface options. But it doesn’t carry responsibility the way a person does. It doesn’t feel the weight of consequences. It doesn’t care about the human being on the other end of the decision. It doesn’t wrestle with what should be done. Only what can be done.

That still belongs to us.

I want to be honest about the limits of that claim. The argument that human judgment is safe from automation isn’t permanently settled. AI is advancing in that direction too. Anyone who draws that line with complete confidence is overconfident.

But if I define my value only by output and routine execution, I’ll always be vulnerable to something faster.

If my value includes judgment, trust, discernment, adaptability, and the ability to connect my small part of the field to a larger purpose, then the picture changes. AI becomes a tool I use, not a definition of who I am, or an immediate replacement for the work I do.

For some people, this reframing will feel like genuine good news. Their roles have always required judgment, and AI can finally free them from the parts that didn’t.

For others, the harder truth is that their role may need to change. Some work is primarily mechanical. Some lanes will be redesigned or eliminated in this process.

The courage in that moment isn’t pretending the role is something it isn’t. It’s being willing to grow. To move toward the parts of the field where human judgment still has the most to offer.

That is a hard ask. Unfortunately, for many people, it’s becoming a necessary one.

I also want to be honest about who fits this reframing the most. If you have domain knowledge, a network, and some runway, the opportunities ahead are genuine. If you are mid-career in a role that has been primarily mechanical, the path from insight to action looks different. That doesn’t make the direction wrong. It means the journey looks different depending on where you’re starting from.

But here’s something else worth considering, especially if uncertainty feels more like a threat than an opportunity.

The same tools raising these questions are also lowering barriers in ways we have never really seen before. Starting something new used to require capital, staff, infrastructure, and years of groundwork before the first real result.

That is still true for some things. But for many others, the gap between I have an idea and I have something real has collapsed in ways that are genuinely new.

The foosball player who spent years developing judgment, domain knowledge, and an instinct for the game now has access to tools that can help them build something of their own…not just execute better inside someone else’s system.

That’s a different kind of power than speed or efficiency.

It’s agency, if we choose to use it.

And it doesn’t have to be a solo venture. Some of the most interesting things happening right now involve small groups of people — two, three, maybe five — who share domain knowledge, complementary judgment, and a problem worth solving. With the help of these AI tools, they can pool their capabilities in ways that would have required a full company to attempt a decade ago.

Not everyone will go this route. Not everyone should.

But the option is more available than it has ever been. And for the person who has been quietly wondering whether there’s a different game they should be playing, this moment may be less of a threat and more of an opening.

The foosball player is still fixed to the rod. Still limited. Still dependent on timing. Still part of a game they don’t fully control.

That hasn’t changed.

What may need to change is the story the player tells about themselves. A bigger, truer one. One with more possibilities.

Use the AI tools. Learn how to maximize your position with them.

But don’t let AI reduce you.

You were never only the motion. You were never only the output. You were never only the kick.

You were the one responsible for what to do when the ball came your way, and that’s still true.

And now, for the first time, you may have more say than ever in choosing your table.

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash – I’ve only played foosball a few times. I’m terrible at it and haven’t played it enough to feel like the game is anything more than randomness and chaos. Funny thing is that lots of workers have a similar perspective on the job they’re doing for their employer.