It is easy to feel behind in your career. Like everyone else is surpassing you. Like all the dreams you had a few years ago are still unrealized, and that other people are filling in those gaps that you wanted to fill. If you’ve ever had a huge dream, sat on it for a few years and got distracted with meaningless busy work, you know what I’m talking about. The key to overcoming this is realizing the power of incremental progress.

I totally messed up. Again and again over the course of my career. There was the time I wrote and played an original song for someone’s birthday on my ukulele, at a staff meeting in my early 20’s, in the presence of a very bewildered client, who later complained to my manager. I was one week in to the job. The time I accidentally let baby tarantulas loose in my student teaching classroom, when I was supposed to be in charge.

A lot of people who are new or less experienced with GenAI complain about the way it makes stuff up (known as hallucination). Sometimes this comes down to a misunderstanding of how these systems work with information. For most of our internet-enabled life, we’ve used search engines that look for matching text and keywords on pre-existing webpages. In other words, we’ve used it for information retrieval. GenAI can be quite unreliable in certain situations.

After all, what is a hypothesis if it isn’t trying to prove an intuitive nudge? My third-grade teacher would have me believe that is a hypothesis is basically an “educated guess,” which is a good explanation for a third grader… but I’m starting to realize it’s more than that. Perhaps the science is the afterthought, a result that is enabled by an intuitive nudge. Consider the Buddha, who clearly believed in the healing benefits of meditation long before the science caught up.

There are three steps if you want to truly be in someone’s corner: Become endlessly curious about their lives. Don’t tell them why you like their work; ask them what makes it important. See their flaws as human; believe in their full potential. This makes you less critical and judgy. It helps you see everyone as incredible human beings who sometimes get in their own way. Tell them the truth. With love.