For a person like me who has naturally been fearful and overly cautious, I can’t think of anything else that could have caused this transformation other than a continuous engagement with the word of God.
I dare say transformation because if I have seen it, then I can live it.
I do remember feeling fear, but that fear was not going to stop me. This was a dream. Whereas in real life, fear has stopped me a good number of times.
Whatever could make me think of touching a snake at all, I can only attribute to a new powerful state of mind in which dwells possibilities and audacity.
I saw a snake in my dream and I thought about grabbing it by the head, something I doubt I have the courage or the experience to do in real life.
And I realise that in the subconscious such as in your dream, the real YOU is often revealed to you.
A CEO at Davos last week told me on stage that he was disappointed his son chose creative writing over computer programming.
After quite a lot of reflection, I believe his son might be making the smarter bet.
We're entering the age of deferred thinking. Everyone's outsourcing their reasoning to chatbots. The muscle that used to get exercised through struggle - the actual process of figuring something out - is slowly atrophying...
Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist I wrote about in my book, had this idea that you don't truly understand something until you can explain it simply. (The person who complicates something usually understands it the least.)
His method was to take a blank piece of paper and write out an explanation as if teaching it to someone who knew nothing about the subject.
Wherever his writing became vague or convoluted, he knew that was a gap in his own understanding. Then he'd go back and fill it.
He knew something I think this generation is forgetting: writing is the most powerful thinking tool we have.
Writing is the act of organising chaos into clarity.
When you write, you're forced to confront what you actually know versus what you think you know. You discover gaps. You fill them. You sharpen vague intuitions into precise ideas.
AI gives you answers. Writing gives you a deep understanding.
If the rest of the world stops writing and you continue, you'll learn faster, understand more deeply, and develop better judgement. While everyone else consumes AI-generated answers, you'll be the one generating the most important questions.
And I think the person asking better questions owns the future.
I said to my best friends this morning that something really weird has happened since AI emerged. I'm writing MORE than I ever have in my life.
I would have thought ChatGPT meant I'd never write again, but the opposite has happened.
I now see writing as a huge competitive advantage in business. To write is to think. To think is to understand. And only if you understand, can you innovate.
Maybe the most valuable skill of the next decade looks exactly like the most valuable skill of the last thousand years.
Maybe the most important skill in a world of AI is continuing to write!
Just a thought!
⚠️ (ai was not used in the making of this content)
Unpopular opinion: Even with ChatGPT writing for you, being able to write yourself is the most important skill of the next decade.
AI gives you answers. Writing gives you understanding. Understanding creates better questions.
The person asking better questions owns the future.