Awesomeness in the AI Age

For the climbers, and for the ones who hold the rope.

* * *

“The greatest untapped resource on planet Earth is human potential.”

— Joe Liemandt

This book grew out of a single sentence Joe Liemandt said on a podcast in the spring of 2026 — that kids want to do awesome things — and the realization, sitting at a kitchen table with that sentence still in the room, that adults wanted to do them too.

What Joe and his colleagues at Alpha School have built for children — the radical, structurally-honest application of high standards and high support to the actual developmental needs of a real human — is, with a small set of adjustments, the framework the rest of us have been looking for in our own one life.

The chapters that follow are an attempt to make that framework operational for thirty of the most acute, most measurable, and least-served pain points of being alive in 2026. Each chapter names a pain that millions of real people are searching for an answer to. Each chapter ends with a real, named human who has built or embodied an answer — a rope-holder whose name is now on the public library shelf in the form of a book, a study, a clinic, a movement, or a life.

The reader is not asked to be more than the readers of any other book have ever been asked to be.

The reader is asked to climb.

The rope is in your hand.

The book is in front of you.

The wall is real.

So is the harness.

So is the bell at the top.

Part I: Am I Going to Be Okay?

Existential, FOBO, Money

What Am I For, If a Machine Can Do What I Do?

On a Tuesday afternoon in March, a forty-seven-year-old senior copywriter named Maren sat at her desk, opened a campaign brief, pasted it into a tool her agency had installed two months earlier, and watched fourteen finished ad concepts appear on her screen in under three minutes.

The brief had asked for one concept.

She read all fourteen carefully. Three of them were better than what she would have written. Five of them were as good. Six of them needed work but were faster to fix than to draft from scratch. She forwarded the best three to her boss with a note that said Take your pick. He wrote back forty seconds later: Beautiful. Ship the first one. Can you do the same thing for the Henderson account by Friday?

She said yes. She closed her laptop. She drove home. She sat in her car in the driveway for twenty minutes without going inside.

She had been doing this job for twenty-two years. She was, by every reasonable measure, excellent at it. She had a Cleo on the shelf in her office. She had hired and trained nine people who now ran their own creative departments. Her name was attached to three campaigns you would recognize on sight.

In the car, she realized that the part of her work she was best at had just become the part that took the least time.

And she could not figure out, sitting there in the driveway, whether what she felt was relief or grief.

* * *

If you have not had a version of this moment yet, you will.

You will be in the middle of doing something you are good at — a task that took you fifteen years to learn, a craft you are quietly proud of, a skill you put your kid through college with — and a machine will do it in front of you in two minutes. And you will not know whether to feel like a genius or a ghost.

This is the most acute, most measurable, and most accelerating anxiety in modern working life. It has a name now. FOBO. Fear of Becoming Obsolete.

In 2024, 28% of workers globally said they were afraid AI would make their job obsolete. By 2026, that number is 40%. Inside the 18-to-24 bracket, the fear is 129% higher than for older workers. Half of Gen Z job seekers now say AI has diminished the value of the college degree they just spent four years earning. And in a single year, the share of people actively job-hunting collapsed from 93% to 43% — not because people are happy, but because they have stopped believing the search will work.

That is not a labor-market story. That is a soul story.

People are not just afraid of losing their job. They are afraid of losing their answer to the question of what they are for.

For two hundred years, “what do you do?” has been a stand-in for “who are you?” That conflation was always a little broken, but it worked. You were a teacher. You were a welder. You were a lawyer, an accountant, a designer, a nurse. The job was the answer. The answer fit on a business card.

And now the business card is being printed by a machine.

* * *

Here is the part nobody is telling you, and the reason the standard advice is making this worse instead of better.

There are two voices yelling at you right now about what to do about the machine. Both of them are wrong, and both of them are wrong in the same way.

The first voice says: Relax. Don’t worry. It’s just a tool. You’ll be fine. AI will create more jobs than it destroys, just like every other technology in history.

This voice is wrong because it is offering you support without a standard. It is patting your hand and asking nothing of you. And your gut knows it. Your gut knows that “you’ll be fine” is what people say when they don’t actually know whether you will be fine. It is the corporate-Slack equivalent of a parent saying let’s not worry about it while quietly putting your favorite stuffed animal in a garbage bag. It is, in the language of this book, low standards and indulgent support. It feels like kindness. It is, actually, abandonment.

The second voice says: Wake up. Adapt or die. Learn to use AI or be replaced by someone who does. The future belongs to the agile.

This voice is wrong because it is the opposite mistake. It is barking the standard from the bottom of the wall and walking away. Adapt or die is a sentence, not a method. It tells you the wall is there but offers no harness, no belay line, no person at the bottom holding the rope. It is high standards and zero support, dressed up as tough love, and it produces exactly two outcomes: a small minority who would have figured it out anyway, and a much larger majority who burn out, freeze up, or internalize their freezing as proof that they were never going to make it.

Neither voice will get you anywhere good. Both of them will be quoted at you at least once a week for the rest of your life. Neither one of them is the answer.

The answer is the third voice. The one almost no one is using.

* * *

The third voice says: The wall is real. The machine is real. Your job, in its old form, is going to change beyond recognition. And — you are not climbing this wall alone, you are not climbing it without a rope, and there is, right now, a specific climbing technique that works.

That is the only voice this book trusts. And it is the voice every single chapter is built on. High standards. High support. Side by side. Neither one optional. Neither one softened by the presence of the other.

So let us do for FOBO what we are going to do for every pain in this book. Let us name the actual standard. And let us name the actual scaffolding.

The standard. Your old job description is gone. Not “evolving.” Gone. The pieces of your work that a machine can do, a machine will do, and pretending otherwise will get you laid off in 2027 and bitter in 2028. The standard is that you must — calmly, deliberately, with an open notebook and an open mind — separate the parts of your work that only you can do from the parts a machine now does better. And then you must rebuild your professional life around the first category and let the second one go without mourning it for longer than is dignified.

The support. You do not have to do this alone, and you should not. The single most powerful intervention for FOBO is not a course. It is a peer. One other human, in your industry or one adjacent to it, who is doing the same separation work at the same time and will compare notes with you weekly for six months. Add to that one mentor who has already lived through one disruption (web, mobile, social, cloud, doesn’t matter which) and remembers what the other side felt like. Add to that one AI tool you use daily and grow up alongside, not as a threat but as a colleague. That triangle — peer, mentor, machine — is your harness.

Most people will read this paragraph and nod and do none of it. The reader I am writing this book for is the one who will read this paragraph and do all three of those things this week.

* * *

Here is what is going to happen to Maren.

The first version of Maren keeps doing what she did Tuesday. She uses the tool. She ships more work. She quietly counts the days until layoffs. She updates her LinkedIn but does not press Open to Work because doing so would make it real. She tells her husband she’s fine. Her boss promotes the twenty-six-year-old who just started using the tool first, because the twenty-six-year-old is not carrying twenty-two years of grief about it.

That is the version where Maren got high standards from her boss and zero support from anyone.

The second version of Maren walks into her boss’s office on Friday and says: I shipped Henderson. I want to talk about what I am now actually for. She names what she is uniquely good at — the strategic taste, the client whisper-work, the ability to spot which of fourteen AI concepts is the one that will move a board of directors. She asks to be paid for that, not for the volume of concepts that have stopped being scarce. She finds two peers at competing agencies and they start a private group chat that is brutally honest about what’s working. She picks one tool, learns it deeper than anyone else at the agency, and starts teaching twenty-somethings how to use it without losing themselves.

Within eighteen months, Maren is paid more, works less, and has an answer to the dinner-party question that is not “I’m a copywriter.” It is something closer to: I help people decide what to make in the age of machines. Same person. Same hands. Same heart. New answer.

That is the version where the wall stayed forty feet tall and somebody — Maren herself — finally tied on a harness.

The Awesomeness

There is a sixty-one-year-old accountant in a small Iowa town right now running a four-person practice that does the work of forty.

She let go of two things in the spring of 2024: the late nights doing tax returns by hand, and the assumption that her job was the returns. She kept everything else. The conversations at the kitchen table with farmers who were trying to decide whether to retire or expand. The knowledge of which client needed a phone call before April 14th. The judgment, built over thirty-five years, of when a number on a page is hiding a story underneath it. The machine does the math now. She does the relationship. Her clients have never been happier. She has never made more money. She has never worked fewer hours.

She is not unusual. She is what the next ten years look like.

For three hundred years, the industrial economy paid knowledge workers to produce more. Type faster. Read faster. Write more memos. Fill more spreadsheets. We have been competing on a track the machine was always going to win, and we have been calling it being professional.

In the AI age, the standard finally inverts. The standard is no longer more. The standard is better. Better questions. Better judgment. Better taste. Better presence with the human across the table. Better understanding of what the work is actually for.

For two centuries, the parts of you that are most human — your taste, your warmth, your ability to read a room, your gut for what matters — were the parts you were quietly told to keep off the timesheet. They were not, technically, productive. The machine is the thing that finally makes them productive. The machine is the thing that finally pays you for them.

That is not a tragedy. That is the largest professional liberation in living memory.

Look up from this page for a second.

Somewhere out there right now, a forty-something doctor is catching a tumor three years earlier than the previous generation of doctors could. A teacher with one classroom is giving each of her twenty-six kids a personalized lesson plan, the way kings used to give their princes private tutors. A first-time founder is shipping a real product to real customers from her kitchen table without ever hiring an engineer. A small-town lawyer is taking on a Fortune 500 in court because the discovery work that used to require a hundred associates now takes her one afternoon. An eighty-year-old grandmother is finishing the novel she abandoned in 1973 because the words finally come faster than her hands can fall asleep.

These are not science fiction stories. These are this morning’s stories. Multiply each of them by ten million. That is the awesomeness coming.

The 47-year-old in the driveway is not at the end of her career.

She is, for the first time, at the beginning of it.

Brain Lift

You are not going to put this book down without doing the work. Every chapter ends with one question. Take five minutes and write your answer in the margin, or on your phone, or — better — in a notebook you will look at next year.

The question for this chapter is two questions:

1. Name one thing you are currently doing at work that a machine will do faster, better, or cheaper within twelve months. Write it down. Be specific. No flinching.

2. Name one thing you are currently doing at work that only you can do — that no machine, however good, can replace. Write it down. Be specific. This is the seed of your next ten years.

Now do one more thing this week. Find one human being who is in the same fight, and send them this chapter. The harness only works if there is someone on the other end of the rope.

* * *

If you do nothing else from this chapter, do that. The whole book is built on it.