A message to young people: Three principles for surviving the AI era

If there was only one thing I could tell my younger self, what would it be?

"Life is like compound interest." The momentum you build in the first few years determines the trajectory for the following decades.

Use adults—there are plenty of adults who want to help young people.

First, there's one thing I want to tell young people. You should take full advantage of adults. There are far more adults out there than you might think who want to help young people. Especially for adults who are already bored with themselves, the energy of young people is dazzling. If you confront that rough energy head-on, someone will surely support you.

To achieve that, you must not do ordinary things. Indulge your selfishness. Politeness is necessary, but you don't need to hold back. The greatest weapon of youth is your ability to unleash pure, unprocessed, raw energy.

20Focus on the race to find what you love during your youth.

From now on, it's the era of "likes" over "strengths." The game of finding your strengths and weapons will be replaced by AI. Areas where high reproducibility creates value will be increasingly compressed in the future. What will remain are areas where you can operate driven by passion. The very passion that allows you to immerse yourself in what you love for hours will attract value.

"There are two things you should do in your 20s. The first is to run a race to find what you love. It’s okay if it’s a hobby. Rather, deepen and expand your hobbies. The second is to live solely for stimulation and newfound insights. Don’t flock with the same kind of people."

Change the quality of information. Invest in yourself over saving.

At this time of year, I compress life.

What is failure? Failure is another name for success. Failures in your 20s aren't even failures yet. It's a time to gain special experience points with all your might.

Don't seek the right answer – don't try to know yourself

Finally, just one trap young people often fall into: Don't seek the right answer. The "right answer" that adults today know will be different for the future era. The right answer for an era of working alongside AI is something no one knows yet. Adults don't really know either. Everyone is anxious, just peeking at the future through a small window. The strategy of copying others' answers to achieve reproducibility is no longer effective.

And one more thing. Don't try to know yourself. What is oneself, what is love, what is a weapon – these are questions humanity has been asking for 2,000 to 3,000 years without anyone answering them. There's no way you'll find the answers after a few years of struggling. You can't know yourself. Weapons are relative things. If that's the case, then place yourself where their relative value increases.

Viewed on the scale of a lifetime, the failures and successes you can achieve now are negligible. When you look back in the future, everything will be a brilliant asset from a passionate, youthful period where you desperately lived through it all. So, stop agonizing over finding some non-existent "correct answer" and be foolish. Let's have a three-year-old race. If you become calm, you lose. Use these few years in your twenties as seed capital for compound interest, and burn as brightly as you can.

↓Related articles are here↓

↓ Latest articles are here ↓

Frequently Asked Questions