This morning, before my coffee had gone cold, another AI newsletter landed in my inbox. I opened it, the way I open all of them, because this is literally my job and I tell myself I have to keep up. Three paragraphs in, there were already five tools I'd never heard of, all apparently released in the last 48 hours, all apparently going to change everything.
I closed it.
Not because it wasn't useful. It probably was. But because in that moment, sitting at my desk at half eight in the morning, I felt something I don't talk about much. I felt genuinely overwhelmed. And I'm the person who built a business around this. I teach AI to professionals and business owners. I read the research, I track the tools, I spend more time inside this world than most people I know. And I still closed that email because my brain simply couldn't hold any more of it.
So if that's how it feels for me, I've been thinking about what it must feel like for everyone else.
THE ONE INSIGHT
Here's the thing about the question everyone keeps asking. Will AI take my job? It's not a bad question. It's just the wrong one, and I think the reason we keep asking it is because we're scared, and when we're scared, we want a straight answer. Yes or no. Safe or not safe. Stay or run.
But that's not how any of this works.
I've been sitting with this for a while now, and the more I sit with it, the more I keep coming back to the same thing. We have been here before. Not with AI specifically, but with this exact fear, dressed in different clothes. When the industrial revolution happened, and manufacturing started replacing manual farm labour, farmers genuinely believed they were finished. That their skills, their way of life, the thing they'd built their whole identity around, was about to become worthless. Some of it did become worthless. But what actually happened was that humanity moved, awkwardly and not without real pain, into something new. Then the internet arrived, and every shop owner in the country was told the high street was finished. Some of it was. But people adapted, built new things, and found new ways to be useful.
We adapted every single time. Not smoothly. Not without losing things that mattered. But we adapted.
The problem right now is that we have very short memories, and when something feels this fast and this big, history feels too far away to be useful. It doesn't feel like the internet. It feels like something different. And maybe it is different in pace. But the human capacity to find a way through, to make ourselves relevant in a changed world, that hasn't changed. That's never changed.
What I actually fear, and this is the honest version, is not the people whose jobs are going to change. Those people, if they're paying attention, have time to move. What I fear is the people who are so paralysed by the question of whether AI is coming for them that they've stopped doing anything at all. Because that paralysis is the real risk. Not the technology.
THE ACTION STEP
So instead of asking whether your job is safe, try asking something more useful.
What part of what I do every day actually requires me, my judgment, my relationships, my ability to read a room or make a call that can't be reduced to a prompt? Start there. Be honest. Most people, when they actually sit down and think about it, have more of that than they realise. The problem is we spend so much time on the parts of our jobs that could be automated that we've forgotten to notice the parts that can't.
And if you don't know where to start, start small. Pick one tool, not five, not the ones from that newsletter that overwhelmed you this morning. One tool that's relevant to the work you actually do. Spend two weeks actually using it. That's it. You'll learn more from two weeks of real use than from six months of reading about what's coming.
The overwhelm is real, I feel it too. But the answer to overwhelm is never more information. It's one smaller, more honest question.
My latest project…
A few weeks ago, I shared a short book about my weight loss and health journey, and the identity shift that made it possible.
Not the routines or the rules, but the internal changes that had to happen for me to stop cycling and start moving forward. I’m mentioning it here for anyone new, or anyone who wants to understand the deeper work behind sustainable change.
You can find it here if you want to read more.
Before You Go
I’ve been writing these pieces in the quiet, between school runs, work, and late-night thinking, but I’ve started sharing more of the journey in real time too. The reflections, the systems, the messier parts of reinvention that never make it into the newsletter.
If you want to follow along, you’ll find me here:
Come say hi. It’s less about followers, more about finding the others who are doing the invisible work too.
If something in this email made you pause, think, or feel seen, send it to a friend who’s been quietly trying to make a change, too.
You never know what might land at the right moment. Link here.
“You do not beat AI overwhelm by learning everything. You beat it by choosing one useful thing and actually using it.”