Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #46
Dealing with AI Anxiety and FOMO
Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free post I send out once a week. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.
Dealing with AI Anxiety and FOMO
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been going pretty crazy for all things AI over the last few months (it would be hard to miss). I’ve been building things, writing about it, co-founding companies with sassy dragons, basically spending hours every day in AI land.
I’ve felt my fair share of anxiety and FOMO, both in life, in NFTs, and more recently, in the AI space. One interesting thing that I’ve found though is that the more time I spend with AI, the less anxious I feel about it. Which is funny because for a lot of people (probably most people) it’s the opposite. The more they read about AI, the more anxious they get. And I think the reason is that reading about AI and using AI are completely different experiences.
Reading about AI gives you sensationalist headlines. Jobs are being replaced. Some new model just came out that’s 10x better than the last one. Someone built an entire app in 30 minutes. It’s all framed to make you feel like you’re falling behind, because that’s what gets clicks and engagement.
Using AI gives you reality. Which is that these tools are genuinely useful for a lot of things, genuinely bad at a lot of other things, and the learning curve to get value out of them is not actually that steep at all. You just have to sit down and start.
You don’t need to understand how large language models work. You don’t need to have an opinion on AGI timelines or which model is best. You need to open ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and ask it to help you with something you’re actually working on. A real task. That’s it. It’s like crypto: yeah you can learn by reading books and watching videos and all that, but there’s no substitute to setting up a wallet and making a transaction onchain.
I think a lot of the anxiety comes from a place of consuming too much and doing too little, which ties back to what I wrote recently about your information diet. Every AI hyped up thread you read, every “I replaced my entire team with AI” post, every breathless announcement about some new capability… it all adds to the noise. And noise adds to your anxiety.
The people I know who are most comfortable with AI right now are the ones who use it daily. Whether it’s summarizing documents, brainstorming ideas, writing code, researching topics, creating content, whatever. They’re not (necessarily) trying to keep up with every development, they just found a few things it’s good at and built them into their workflow.
I’ve been guilty of the consumption trap too, by the way. I went through a phase of bookmarking every AI tool and tutorial I came across, and it took me a while to realize that none of that was making me better at actually using the stuff. What made the difference was picking one project — in my case, building a prediction model — and just going. Learning by doing, making mistakes, figuring it out as I went.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by AI right now, my advice woudl be simple: stop opening X, stop bookmarking tweets, stop reading sensationalist headlines, stop watching youtube videos. Just stop consuming content about AI for like a week. Instead, pick one thing in your life or work that’s annoying or tedious, and ask an AI to help you with it. That’s it. One thing. See what happens.
You might be surprised at how quickly the anxiety fades when you replace it with actual experience.
Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇
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Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser. These are only my own opinions and ideas. You should always consult with a professional/licensed financial adviser before trading or investing in any cryptocurrency related product. Some of the links shared may be referral links.