I went to bed early last night, tired after conducting an NTU AI workshop, and involuntarily woke up early at 4.30am. I saw that Ryan Holiday’s “Wisdom Takes Work” book was on sale at the Kindle Store for $2.99. I bought the book, started reading at 5am and didn’t stop till 8.30am when I had read and highlighted the important points in every chapter.
My plea to you: Please buy this book and read it! It contains a million dollars’ worth of advice!
People often ask me how to survive the AI disruption and the increasingly bad news. You’ve also heard incessantly that we must use AI with judgement and ethics. Then we also see that many people have abandoned reading, writing and thinking in favour of succumbing to algorithms and rootless emotions.
After reading the book, I have a new clarity. For the past ten years, I have understood my life’s mission to be “helping people find a better way” to deal with different things. My motivation came from appreciating those who have helped and mentored me throughout my life. I started teaching Gen AI in 2023 because I saw how it could change the world and I wanted to help people deal with this exciting and frightening disruption.
But in the past year, I’ve been wrestling with the difficulty of teaching the more advanced techniques to learners, because I saw that they needed multiple types of literacies (eg. tech literacy, media literacy, data literacy) to create AI-powered work solutions. I wondered how I could possibly help them fill gaps that should have been filled years ago. I was starting to worry if I had reached the limits of how I could help others.
Now, after reading this book, I realise that what we all really need is more wisdom – about ourselves, about other humans, about our work, about how things work, about why things DON’T work – in order to tackle this big unknown AI thingy. This book has already helped me to start reshaping the way I teach AI and communication, and reshape the way I reshape myself.
Here’s an excerpt from the book to close this post, and for me to print out to stick on my wardrobe:
“Brave. Strong. Good. Wise.”