Guy Reams (00:00.866)
This is day 161, the difference between inevitable and dominant. So I was talking to the friend this morning who was convinced that AI is going to destroy our society. Maybe he's right. I don't know. But he listed entire professions that would be wiped out. Then he told me he was going to fight it because someone had to fight it. I sat there thinking his fight was probably in vain.
The continuous adoption of AI just seemed inevitable. It'd be kind of like fighting the industrial revolution or fighting the textile revolution or fighting the proliferation of the cotton gin or whatever. But that word inevitable kept sitting wrong with me as I thought about it more. Most of what we call inevitable is just momentum that feels too large, too complex, or too costly for us as an individual to challenge.
that distinction matters more than we think it does. Your three options when facing a major force like this are you could fight it, you could join it, or potentially you could redirect it. Those options are not equal. They depend entirely on whether the force you are facing is truly fixed or just currently dominant. There's a more grounded way to decide. Ask yourself three questions. Is this actually inevitable?
Truly inevitable? Or just dominant right now? Do I have leverage in this system? Or do I just have opinions about it? What would this look like if I didn't engage with it at all? Your answer will usually reveal the path that you should take. The mistake is not choosing the wrong strategy. It is mislabeling the situation. People fight things that are already locked in.
They join things that they could have disrupted. They avoid creating new paths because the current one feels too real. I've done all three of these at different times. I have fought the market shift that was already complete and I wasted two years of my life. I joined a trend that I should have questioned and ended up building something I really didn't believe in and it didn't go anywhere. I avoided starting something new because the existing system looked permanent.
Guy Reams (02:24.748)
And by the time I moved, someone else had already done my idea. None of those failures came from bad effort. They came from bad framing. I treated momentum like fate. I mistook dominance for permanence. I confused the current state with the only state. Clarity on what you're actually dealing with matters more than the choice itself. When I think about my friend now, I do not think he is wrong to care about this topic.
I think he has not yet asked the right question. If AI adoption is truly inevitable, fighting it head on is just noise. If it's only dominant right now, then the fight might be worth it, but only if he has actual leverage, which he doesn't. And if he has no leverage in the system itself, then his best move might be to step outside of it entirely and build something the system cannot touch. That isn't surrender. I think that's called strategy.
I'm not telling you to stop caring about the forces reshaping your work or your industry or even your life. I'm telling you to name them correctly first, then decide. Sit down today, pick one thing that you've been calling inevitable. Write down whether this is truly locked in or just currently winning. Then write down what leverage you think you might actually have, not what you wish you had. What do you have right now?
That clarity will show you whether to fight, join, or just walk in a path entirely different path.