The Top Ten Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Work
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the news about AI replacing white collar jobs and associated layoffs.
Block just cut 4,000 people at once. That’s about half of its workforce.
Other layoffs reported over the last year include:
Dell: 13,000
Intel: 27,000
Meta: 11,000
UPS: 48,000
FedEx: 12,000
Boeing: 17,000
Verizon: 15,000
Walmart: 12,000
Amazon: 30,000
Microsoft: 15,000
Citigroup: 20,000
Oracle is on deck for thousands more based on recent financial reports.
We’re at the beginning of a workforce revolution.
And while these numbers are staggering, the good news is that we also have an incredible amount of tools and infinite more options than we had in the past.
The 9-5 is no longer the safe option. It’s time to start designing our careers, versus defaulting to them in a system that is now broken and outdated. It’s time to start creating our own systems and designing our own work. That’s how you win the Future of Work. You stop defaulting and you start designing. The best POV wins, because everything that can be defaulted to is what AI can replace. AI cannot replace your unique POV in the world.
This is why it’s such an exciting time for the workforce, because there is so much untapped potential. If every single one of us has our own unique special sauce, there’s actually quite a bit of awesomeness that can come out of the current workforce revolution we’re seeing the beginning of right now.
If you’re not yet convinced that this is a very exciting opportunity to prepare yourself for the Future of Work, here are the top ten reasons why you should be excited about the future of work.
The Top Ten Reasons You Should Be Excited About The Future of Work
Because you can finally….
Ditch your resume and start leading with your life.
The future of work relies less on a perfect resume with a linear career path, which is narrow in nature and sounds like everyone else. Instead of thinking of yourself as the same in a sea of thousands of resumes, think of yourself as one unique blueprint of eight billion. Winning the future of work relies more on a unique human point of view, based on solving strategic problems with critical thinking, story telling and creativity as core skills that AI cannot replicate. Things you’ve learned to do by living your life, not just at work. Using human problem-solving skills to solve human problems. AI can support the execution, but it needs the input of your unique lived experience, life and judgement.
The traditional resume and career ladder are dead. The new career path is unique and personal, because it’s yours and yours only. It’s time to ditch your resume and start leading with your life.
2. Exit the 9-5 hamster wheel and glass ceiling for good.
The 9-5 will be extinct by 2034, according to Reid Hoffman. To some, that might sound scary. To others, that may sound relieving in some ways. Low engagement and high-burnout numbers as well as mass layoffs have all led to the 9-5 being less stable, reliant and sustainable of an option as it used to be. The 9-5 is also spending the majority of your time making someone else rich, when in reality with the tools you have access to today, you could be spending that time making yourself rich. The constructs under which a 9-5 job operates have changed and therefore we must change with them.
You can literally make a career doing anything you want today. The question is not if you can, it’s what you want to do. If you’re ready to get started and exit the 9-5 for good, watch our free Exit Plan training to learn more and book your free call.
3. Explore your creative side
Do you know what AI cannot replicate? A lived human life. The unique combination of your background, skills, values, experiences, desired impact in the world and what you truly care about. That’s your special sauce.
The reason this time is so exciting is because you’re able to free yourself of the confines of that resume, and start to explore your creative side. Whatever that looks like for you. I guarantee you can create something of value for this world that no one else can and I think that’s one of the most exciting opportunities we have in front of us right now. Yes, you!
4. Center your life around the things you care about
It used to be that we felt we had to choose between meaningful work and what pays the bills. That gap is closing now for several reasons. First, the rise of AI indicates that we need more humans solving human problems, now more than ever. Otherwise it’s all AI slop reflected back at one another in one hellish echo chamber. It indicates that we need to fight less about AI stealing our jobs, and more about the sustainability of the human race and how to evolve with it. To create new things for the new problems we are seeing.
That’s where The Career Design Method comes in. It’s the proven psychology-backed framework that helps you design the most successful, sustainable career for you based on what you care about and can uniquely provide the world. Not about what the market is telling you to do, because to win the future of work, you need to differentiate yourself, not sound like everyone else in the market.
Doesn’t that sound like the freedom you’ve always craved? To stop caring about KPIs that don’t matter and start caring about what matters to you in this life, and working on that? If so, you’re not alone. The data shows many workers are even hoping to get laid off, so they have the opportunity to get unstuck and freed from their corporate prison.
We spend almost 30% of our lives at work, my recommendation is to make that time count.
5. Create a legacy that isn’t someone else’s.
When we were promised a career that spanned decades at the same employer, employee loyalty was rewarded with handsome pensions and regular pay increases and promotions, for the most part. In the modern workforce, the opposite is true. The employer holds the cards, and employees are at the mercy of slaving away for someone else’s dream, only with the constant threat of being laid off the next day.
As we approach 40, we’re often also concerned with the legacy we’re going to leave behind based on development theory from social psychologist Erik Erickson. Generativity vs. stagnation in this stage indicates that if we are creating and leaving legacy we are fulfilled and if we’re stuck, we’re stagnant in this stage. The Millennial Career Crisis has shown us that we’re not alone. We’ve grown up thinking career loyalty was the legacy, but the legacy was always ours to own and now the market is showing us that’s the path forward we must follow.
It’s time we take that legacy back, and start building what we wish to see in the world, instead of doing it for someone else. Carl Jung says “Everything up until 40 is just research” and if this is you, there’s never been a better time to apply everything you’ve learned to create your legacy.
6. Be the healthiest you’ve ever been
Chances are if you worked in corporate or tech, maybe your financial income was decent but that came with one or several trade-offs, am I right? For instance, maybe your physical health or relationships suffered in some way. If so, you’re not alone. Millions of workers suffer from burnout, stress and health-related issues due to their poor work environments.
Did you know that based on a 2022 WorkHuman and Gallup survey that only 10% of a workers well-being is controlled by them and the other 90% is controlled by their work environment, culture and leadership? This means our work environments have huge effects on our health.
When you design your own work with The Career Design Method, you start with your five key pillars of wellness to understand what is going to make the most sustainable, successful career for you, because you cannot pour from an empty cup.
What is all of the money in the bank for, if you don’t have your health? The point is to design your life for both health and wealth.
7. Actually make your unique impact in the world
No one else has your special sauce. If you’ve ever wondered what was possible for you beyond your current job, there’s never been a better time to explore it. What’s the one thing you could create, that one one else can? This is more than just your legacy, it’s combining your intrinsic motivators and combining them with the path that makes the most sense to make the most impact.
You can actually bring to life whatever you want in a way that is unique to you and helps you future-proof yourself all at the same time. There’s something unique that you can offer that no one else can and that becomes your superpower in the future of work. Creating your own unique IP defends you against generic AI content and also creates a recommendation platform for AI to serve you up as a solution
8. Explore multiple unique paths of purposeful and profitable work
It’s time to stop limiting yourself to what 9-5 is available to you and start thinking about how you can use your special sauce to create multiple income streams. You’re not limited to one soul-sucking job like they told you. You’re meant to go solve problems and figure things out instead of spending your time in meetings and making decks look perfect. This should feel exciting and freeing to you, especially with all of the tools you have at your disposal. It may feel scary at first but scarier is staying stuck somewhere and doing nothing about it.
9. Stop defaulting to job boards and start designing your most sustainable, successful path forward based on your life.
It can be a very helpless feeling to scan job boards that feel like they are determining the fate of your future livelihood and well-being and realize that this is a dead end path. It’s time to take control of your career by designing it and stop defaulting to the solutions you know, because that resume isn’t going to cut it anymore. You have to go bigger and bolder now. What a powerful feeling to be able to take control of your career and decide what your future looks like, versus someone deciding it for you.
If you’re ready to get started, watch our free training and book your free call.
10. Position yourself successfully for the Future of Work, regardless of title or position.
By creating your own unique IP, you position yourself uniquely for the future of work because it’s what AI cannot replicate. Your special sauce is based on your unique blueprint and once you turn that into Intellectual Property, you’ve started something that will create long-lasting value way beyond what the 9-5 salary could ever match.
The skills that will be rewarded in the future are highly technical but also highly human skills, such as critical and strategic thinking, creativity and story telling. We need the next generation of humans solving the next generation of human problems. That will be who wins the future of work, not whose resume sounds perfect and like everyone else's.
If you’re ready to get started and know there’s more, that’s because there is. Watch our free training and book your call to get started. You’re only a few steps away from preparing yourself for The Future of Work and designing your best chapter yet. It’s time to get excited!