One of my recent ecologically-not-friendly long showers, started with a solo-concert cover of Backstreetboys (tell me whyyy, ain’t nothing but a…) and resulted in a Substack article on how AI changed (aka bombed) our motivation to develop at work and created an apathy in majority of people I talk to. Enters mid-life crises that’s just lacking a new car or new bangs to label it such. Instead of fancy cars and new bangs (that realistically suit only a percentage of people with very strong face cards) we’re just stuck with a growing “why should I even show up at work when everything I learn and do get’s replaced every new day with AI”.

However, the article mentioned came from my perspective as an employee.

While, simultaneously, I’m not just an employee but also a manager.

Mildly inconvenient.

Because, as much as I am asking myself those questions on where the hell is AI taking us, so is my team.

Now, somewhere in a job description of a manager, there’s this expectation that once you’re a manager, you’re a whole new category and somehow you have all the answers. When team is uncertain you have it all figured out . When they’re anxious, you’re the calm one, when they’re lost, you bring the clarity. Or simply put “managers will have the answer”.

Cute.

Let’s face it - half of the time, we all have no clue what we’re doing as well.

You ask a manager if your job is safe, while that same manager spent the Sunday afternoon ChatGPT-ing “will sales management exist in 2 years”.

So…

what happens when the manager doesn’t know either?

Now, I was always the kind of manager that would not gaslight you into believing I have all the answers or that your concerns are invalid.

Radical honesty was always my go-to, and I tend to lean into saying “I know as much as you do, but we’re in this together and we’ll figure it out”.

However, that’s also a very easy thing for us managers to do. We feel like we’re being truthful and we gain a likability point.

It’s also an easy thing for managers to hide behind, as it also takes responsibility and ownership off of our shoulders.

Because, as much as I can’t give certainty on what will happen in 3 years, I can (and should) give certainty in the present, and stop adding stupid organizational, unnecessary uncertainty on top of it.

And companies add a lot of this stupid unnecessary uncertainty.

I can’t tell you if your skills are going to be valuable in 3 years. But I can tell you what skills you’ll need in the next 6 months in your role, what is going to seen as a good performance and what you today can do great to be a strong performer on the team.

And navigate you to develop and adopt AI in a way that’s not going to make you fear it, but rather enjoy it.

Now imagine you come to someone and tell them “We’re bringing in this AI tool that is going to replace 50% of the things you’ve been doing so far?”

Naturally, any sane person will think “Ok, great, they discovered a way where 50% of what I do doesn’t require me anymore. I’m half-way through to becoming obsolete”.

And they expect me to be excited about it. Yeah, right.

Now, imagine instead you hear “You’ve been extremely valuable in digging and uncovering the actual pain that the customer is facing when they were not able to figure it out themselves. This made our sales-led motion convert with 2x higher ACV compared to the self-serve and retention is higher. I want to create an environment where you can bring more of that to the table and give you more strategic impact. To do that, I found a LinkedIn automation tool that’s going to remove the need for you to manually send connection requests and messages to prospects - so you can have more opportunities to do what you do so well - actually have meaningful conversations instead of simply sitting and clicking “Send connection request” and monitoring when they accept.

This simple reframing of positioning changes the game.

For the team to be excited about AI, they need to know what it’s replacing and what opportunity it brings to them. Not an opportunity to get fired, but rather to upskill in things that matter, gain more ownership and create more impact.

For managers, this might sound as “we’ll that’s a given”.

But if you don’t position it or set it up in a way where bringing AI brings the opportunity, but rather just improves productivity - people learn sth very quickly. Being productive doesn’t make my job better. It just increases the baseline.

They need to know what opportunity it will create for them to be better.

Managers need to define what getting better means.

If we think that AI is making execution cheaper, focusing on rewarding someone just on executing faster is a game they’ll surely lose. AI will always be faster.

Coaching people through execution alone is not enough, but getting them to level up one step above the task is.

Instead of “can you produce this?” go to “what should be produced?” and maybe more importantly “what shouldn’t”.

People producing the most might not be the most valuable ones in the future. But the ones having judgment on what to produce and what not, will be.

And your coaching need to reflect that.

Now, we’re already talking about senior kind of positions here.

But if junior tasks get automated, how does one become senior?

And this is where we as managers need to step up. And become much more intentional in creating learning opportunities to people that used to happen naturally through work.

That might mean giving a problem to someone to solve that could easily be tackled by AI. Deeply inefficient short-term but a company fully focused entirely for immediate AI-efficiency can accidentally remove the experiences through in which future senior people learn how to think.

Now do we balance it out, I don’t know, we all need to figure it out (hence managers not always having the answers)

The manager’s job

Funny thing in all of this is the more we bring technology into the picture, the more I feel like we need to bring the human in management.

You know, trust, empathy, curiosity, compassion, sense of belonging - all the words us managers like to throw around, but majority actually implement it in a way that’s not insanely fake and dare I say “cringe” (yes, I’m a millennial can’t you tell just from my choice of a shower song?)

We need to create an environment where someone can come with a problem or admit a mistake without fearing they’re exposing themselves as obsolete.

So as you’re focused on those fancy AI workflows, don’t forget your people - as they’re the ones adopting them. And by the time you build a fully AI-ran company, you’ll have a company with a highly unmotivated, unproductive team and shiny AI workflows that are not being properly used as they’re ran by people who don’t give a crap. Pardon my French.

So if you’re a manager of a team today, you don’t owe your team certainty.
You owe them clarity, honesty and room to grow so that uncertainty doesn’t turn into helplessnesses.

Much harder than buying a Claude licence, but likely more meaningful.

Unfortunately, all of us work in tech, which means our dinners inevitably start with gossip, move through relationships and questionable life choices and end up at work.

A few tapas and too many cañas into our last dinner (we live in Barcelona), our convo landed somewhere surprisingly bleak.

Not layoffs, or “AI is going to take our jobs”, but something quieter.

A kind of apathy.

A growing sense of: what exactly are we doing all of this for?

Around the table were product people, marketeers, founders, different jobs, different companies, different levels of seniority.

But almost everyone seemed to be feeling some version of the same thing.

We knew our jobs weren’t safe. Our skills were supposed to be.

For most of our careers, working in tech already came with a certain amount of instability.

You were never promised a job for life. The model of our parents working 20+ years in one company was only but a reflection of a past we’re not to have as our future.

Companies would grow, pivot, raise money, run out of money, restructure, replace leadership team, decide Sales was the problem, then decide Marketing was a problem, decide actually everyone was a problem.

Fine.

That was the deal.

You couldn’t control if the company would survive. But you could control your own value.

You could learn a craft, become a better sales person, a better marketeer. You could spend years accumulating knowledge, pattern recognition and expertise.

And even if the company disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have something portable.

Your skills were yours, and that was our physiological safety net.

Then the half-life of a skill got very short.

I don’t think AI made everything we know useless. That would be dramatic, and frankly probably wrong.

But, AI has messed with the deal.

Things you spent years learning to do well can suddenly be done reasonably well by someone with far less experience and the right tools.

And the reasonably well matters.

Most companies don’t need the best cold email written. They need a decent enough cold email written in 30 seconds.

They don’t need the world’s greatest analyst. They need the spreadsheet explained before the meeting starts.

They don’t always need mastery. They need output.

And output is becoming very, very cheap.

So, why all of us are SO TIRED?

Humans are pretty good at suffering when we believe that suffering is getting us somewhere.

Study for years, become a doctor. Train every day, become an athlete. Take terrible entry level jobs, become great at your craft. Do the junior work, accumulate experience, eventually earn your spot.

There is an implicit promise underneath it all: effort compounds.

But what happens when we stop trusting the compounding?

What happens when you spend five years becoming exceptional at something and then watch the market value of that particular skill collapse in eighteen months?

You start asking a fairly dangerous question: what exactly am I supposed to optimize for now?

This question lies beneath what we casually call burnout.

Some burnout is workload - to many meetings, Slack messages, too much pressure, too little sleep.

But there’s another type.

Burnout from meaningless.

Doing a lot while becoming increasingly unsure whether any of it is building toward something.

And that my friend, that’s a dangerous one.

Rest doesn’t completely solve it because exhaustion isn’t the only problem.

You can take two weeks off, come back refreshed, open LinkedIn, see fourteen posts explaining that the job you spent the last decade becoming good at has now been “fully automated,” and immediately want another holiday.

The people running the companies are scared too

The slightly terrifying part is that the people supposed to help employees navigate this transition often don’t know where we’re going either.

Management teams everywhere seem terrified of becoming the company that “missed AI”, so every board meeting becomes: what’s our AI strategy, why aren’t we moving faster, what can we automate, why does that company have seventeen AI agents and we only have three?

Somewhere along the way, leadership can become so busy proving that it is embracing the future that it forgets one of its oldest responsibilities: helping people understand their place in it.

You cannot manage a period of enormous technological change purely through software procurement.

People need a story.

What is changing? What isn’t? What are you asking me to become better at? Where will my value come from in three years? What will you reward? What does a good career here actually look like?

And I don’t think most companies have answers yet.

So we end up in this strange middle ground. Leadership is anxious. Employees are apathetic. Everyone is experimenting with AI.

And half of the “transformation” doesn’t seem to be transforming very much.

We automate work before deciding whether the work was useful, we add agents to broken processes, we measure adoption before impact.

We confuse moving fast with knowing where we’re going.

Or maybe we were getting good at the wrong things

There is another possibility.

Maybe our skills aren’t becoming useless, but we spent the last few decades overvaluing the easiest parts of them to measure.

The value of being a great writer was never typing the sentences.

The value of being a great salesperson was never sending the email.

The value of being a great product manager was never creating the Jira ticket.

AI is making production cheaper. But that doesn’t necessarily make judgment cheaper.

If anything, when the cost of producing things approaches zero, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important.

When everyone can write, taste matters more. When everyone can research, knowing which questions matter becomes more valuable. When everyone can build, deciding what is worth building becomes the scarce thing.

When everyone has an AI assistant capable of producing ten plausible strategies before breakfast, someone still has to look at those ten strategies and say: this one.

And be right.

Maybe the career moat of the future has less to do with executing one specific task and more to do with judgment, context, curiosity, relationships, taste, courage and the ability to make sense of ambiguity.

Which sounds wonderfully philosophical until you realise how inconvenient it is.

There is no straightforward certification in good judgment. No six-week bootcamp in taste. No promotion framework for “understands humans unusually well.”

The old game was imperfect. But at least we understood the rules.

The new one is being written while we’re playing it.

I don’t actually know where this ends

I’m deeply excited by AI, I use it constantly.

I think it will create companies and possibilities that would have been completely absurd only a few years ago.

But excitement and unease are allowed to coexist. Technological progress can be extraordinary while the transition is psychologically brutal.

Both can be true.

Maybe in ten years we’ll look back at this period the way previous generations looked at the arrival of the internet: chaotic and transformative, with the direction looking obvious only in hindsight.

Or maybe we’ll all become AI supervisors overseeing twelve agents whose work we vaguely understand while attending six meetings about productivity.

No clue.

All I know is that the little fantasy I’ve had for years about disappearing somewhere, buying a farm, getting a few chickens and becoming emotionally invested in tomato season is starting to look less like a breakdown and more like sensible career diversification.

But hey.

Elon says we might not even need money one day. 😂

So great.

Worst case, I’ll have my chickens and my eggs.

I feel like I’ve discovered a new corner of the internet. The non-polished, raw version of LinkedIn, where not everything is driven by an algorithm and where not every single post is AI-generated or measured in conversions. Here people seem to be more true, imperfect, not afraid to ask the tough questions, and are messy. I like messy.

So, as I start my own Substack here, I figured the socially acceptable thing before I go and overshare is to introduce myself.

If you know me from LinkedIn, you’ve seen a corporate version of me. The one that leads sales at a fast-growing startup and seems to have all her ducks in a row. I write and talk about sales, building outbound system and, well, how I help companies make money.

But you all, you get a real version of me.

A very unserious me. The one that yes, admittedly is still a sales leader, but spends more time than she should picking a vynil, consistently fails in efforts to make latte art and more importantly (or not importantly at all) spends a lot of her time thinking about the “why’s”.

Why we do what we do? Why are we all identifying with work so much? Why are we all playing this corporate game and follow absurd rules? When does it end, how it ends, and what is this all about? What’s the meaning behind it all - yeah, you’ve been warned, it’ll get philosophical and unfortunately very likely not a very profound.

Before I (un)fortunately landed in sales, I studied journalism. And before marketing teams turned me writing LinkedIn posts into a revenue generating machine, I kinda really loved to write. (I still love my marketing team, in case they’re reading this don’t hate me)

So I decided to give my weird thoughts a space. And you won’t see any grand thesis or 5 steps to do XYZ and admittedly you likely you won’t learn much. For that, we have an Outbound Alchemist channel where we talk all things sales. If that’s your jam, check it out.

But if you’re the kind of person that will stop and say “Oh look at the Moon!” or will spend hours discussing why people do what they do and psychoanalyse everything, might be having a few existential crisis of your own, you’ll like it here.

Make yourself comfortable.

The first essay is already on the way and and naturally, it starts with a few friends having drinks in Barcelona and ends with me seriously reconsidering whether owning chickens might be a more resilient career strategy.

See you inside.

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-Nadja

this below is who you’ll get to know - a kid with a forever “what-in-a-world-is-going-on” resting face playing adulthood.