What you need to survive the AI revolution?
Forget fitting in. The new game is standing out.
Not the credentialed.
Not the compliant.
Not the copy-pasters.
The AI wave isn’t coming—it’s here. And it’s already replacing the predictable.
But here’s the twist:
The people who look the most replaceable on paper are the ones AI still can’t touch.
The self-taught misfits.
The neurodivergent thinkers.
The builders who work with the physical world.
This isn’t a eulogy for human work. It’s a blueprint for who thrives next.
Elite degrees are losing their edge - Unconventional learners are rewriting the rules
It’s common knowledge now: some of the most successful people in the world are college dropouts. Formal education gets you started. But curiosity is what takes you the furthest.
Just today, I was demoing a robot to a few guests, alongside my mentor—a veteran in robotics with over 50 years of experience.
Someone asked him, “How did you get started?”
The room fell silent.
It’s not that the question was inappropriate—it’s just uncommon to ask someone so senior about their origin story. But he didn’t flinch. He said, “People think I started in the right place, with all the right training and guidance. But the truth is—I did a lot of odd jobs before stumbling into robotics. I taught myself. I figured it out as I went.”
I already knew his story. Still, it struck me again how true it is:
Self-taught builders always rise on the top. That was true in the past, and it's just as true today.
We’re shifting from prestige to proof-of-work. It used to be enough to say “I’m from MIT” or “I went to Stanford.”
Not anymore.
I remember this one job interview—15 years ago, right after college. The company flew me to New York. I was surrounded by grads from CMU, MIT, Stanford. The interview itself felt like a formality.
They were handing out job offers like candy—as long as your resume had the right school on it.
But those days are gone.
Today, your work speaks louder than your institution.
Why is this shift happening?
Because information is no longer gated. Google or ChatGPT can teach you faster than most professors. The curriculum is out there—free and waiting.
All you need is the drive to learn. And the grit to endure the discomfort of learning. The real challenge today isn’t access. It’s internal.
The only thing standing in your way is your own inner resistance.
Tame that, and you’re unstoppable.
When you stop chasing credentials and start focusing on output, you realize something important:
Proof-of-work beats pedigree.
Thinking differently is no longer a disadvantage—it’s an edge
Different ≠ Deficient
I never fit into the crowd. I used to filter my thoughts just to fit the room. For a long time, I thought that was a flaw. But the moment I stopped doing that—things shifted.
A decision that came out of that shift was me shifting from industry to academia for 1/3rd pay cut. People thought I was out of my mind. Friends warned me I’d regret it. All I did was, I stopped chasing job titles. I started building.
Now those same friends look at what I get to do—building robots for NASA, traveling to wild places like the Atacama Desert—and they say,
“You’re so lucky.”
But it wasn’t luck. It was the result of thinking differently—and being willing to follow that difference.
When you start thinking differently, you stop trying to optimize broken processes. You start imagining better ones. Try to act like a neurodivergent thinker.
Don’t try to fit into the system. Invent new ones.
That might sound like a rebellious take—but it’s also a practical one.
Here’s why:
AI, by design, outputs the average.
It learns from the crowd, flattens the extremes, and regurgitates the predictable. If you’re aiming to be “normal,” you’re not just competing with other people—you’re competing with machines.
And machines are really good at being normal.
That leaves us with one unfair advantage:
Originality - the strange, the deep and the nonlinear
That’s where we win.
For a long time, I didn’t see it that way. I used to walk into rooms and second-guess myself. I’d filter my thoughts to sound more polished, more “professional.” But no matter how much I masked it, I always felt like the odd one out.
It took me years to realize—that’s exactly where the value was.
Every time I saw something others didn’t, I assumed I was wrong. But looking back, those were the moments I was seeing the blind spots. The cracks in the system. The assumptions no one questioned.
Consensus feels safe.
But it kills creativity.
I remember someone once told me, “You think too much.”At the time, I took it as a warning. Now, I wear it as a badge. Overthinking isn’t the enemy—shallow thinking is.
In a world trained to skim the surface, depth is power.
And the turning point for me? It was when I stopped trying to sound “normal” and started sounding like myself.
That’s when the right people started listening. That’s when the right doors started opening. That’s when I started winning.
People who work with physical systems and tools won’t be easily replaced.
Why should you trust a plumber more than a consultant?
Because one solves real problems. The other makes slides about them.
The ‘get-your-hands-dirty’ crowd is quietly becoming elite. While knowledge workers are being replaced by GPT prompts, embodied workers—surgeons, welders, dancers—are becoming harder to automate.
You can’t fake physical mastery. You can’t delegate it to a model. And there’s no Ctrl+Z in the real world.
When you’re working with hardware, mistakes have mass. I’ve lived that—more than once.
We were testing a robot in the middle of nowhere. It had a meter-long drill designed to retrieve underground samples autonomously. In theory, it all worked fine. But in the field, the drill got stuck. The robot was pinned to the ground. Nothing in the lab had prepared us for that.
There was no manual. No fallback plan. We had to improvise. We hacked together a way to detach the drill on the fly and extract it manually.
That moment taught me more than a dozen simulation runs ever could.
The physical world humbles you. It’s a ruthless but honest teacher.
You can’t theorize your way through a desert deployment.
You need intuition.
You need tinkering.
You need sweat.
That’s the kind of thinking that endures—because it’s rooted in reality.
If you think I’m exaggerating, try building a simple robot on your own. Just getting it to move takes a million things going right.
Which brings me to this:
Writing prompts is not a career. Not anymore.
If you want to thrive in this new AI reality, get off the screen and start building. The future belongs to those who can bridge knowledge with physical execution.
If you’ve been asking yourself, “What do I do now?”
You’re not alone. I’ve asked the same question—and found real answers by building through it.
Join me this Sunday for a free, no-fluff workshop:
“How to Stay Relevant and Thrive in This New AI Reality”
I’ll show you what’s working—and how to stay ahead by doing what AI can’t.
Excited for your workshop!