How to Stay Relevant in Your Career, Such as Embracing ChatGPT
How you embrace technology can have a lasting impact on your career
Here’s five real quotes about technology that make me laugh:
"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." - Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, 1878.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, 1899.
"The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad." - President of the Michigan Savings Bank, 1903.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.
Obviously these folks were wrong, and throughout time there has been pushback from technology as people worry about it making themselves obsolete. What time has proven, however, is technology is a means of creating jobs and making our lives better.
ChatGPT, the 2023 Disruptor
Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a field within computer science that works with large datasets and makes sense of it using algorithms Machine Learning (ML) tools. ChatGPT is the most famous product that does that. You just visit their website, give it a prompt, and it can do a number of things. Here’s some examples:
Write a short. funny, story about a whale, a pig, and a boy named Jim going on an adventure.
Write ten fact filled articles about the benefits of getting enough sleep, all of which promote Purple Mattresses.
Write in HTML code a website that has an auction component.
Write a rhyming poem in a pirate voice that thanks readers of the Unwritten Business Guide for reading this article about ChatGPT.
For fun, here’s that poem:
ChatGPT, and other AI platforms, have the ability to streamline and improve nearly every professional job. The use cases are still being discovered and it could be you who finds a unique way to use it for your role or company! I also imagine just mastering this tool will become a job unto itself. If you’re interested in learning ChatGPT, here are 2 resources I think are great starting points: Getting Started (Click Through the Examples) + Writing Questions
The Application of Technology in Your Career
I remember when I was early in my career I learned that Twitter was going to start allowing advertising. As I was working at an ad agency at the time, this was exciting for us and our clients, but there were a lot of articles warning about the platform and the type of backlash companies could get from advertising on it.
While generally this has often proven true (ex: McDonalds famously didn’t fare so well promoting its #McDstories), there were also benefits for trying out the platform for myself. So I signed up, did a crash course on Twitter advertising, and was one of the first advertisers on Twitter.
I could have smugly sat behind my desk and waited for others to try it, or I could embrace it and try it for myself. And it turns out that my Twitter advertising experience went great!
As I look at former coworkers, friends, and family who have accelerated their careers, one common trend is their openness to new things. The person who can automate their reports with a new technology opens herself up to new opportunities. The colleague who has taken the time to meet with various vendors gets invited to solicit ideas for an RFP. The engineer who tinkered after hours on a new technology finds that it gets added to the product features. The list goes on. There are clear advantages to being an “early adopter”.
People tend to naturally fall somewhere in this technology bell curve, and the trick is to not lag so far behind your coworkers, competition, or industry that you get left behind. The Chasm is the point where things go mainstream.
In my professional experience there’s usually a correlation between someone’s willingness to learn and their overall performance, and technology is no exception. Even if it takes work, always strive to be early in the adoption curve.
Final Thoughts
That’s my push - look for ways to use technology to differentiate yourself and your business, and it may accelerate your career faster than you think. For example, being known as the ChatGPT expert at work may get you invited to meetings and conversations you may not have been privy to otherwise. You may automate part of your job to work on bigger and more important things. Or at the very worst, you at least have a tool to write pirate themed poems!