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When I first got started in my finance career, I found it tremendously exciting. Everything was in motion. In those early years, my income was climbing and my responsibility was climbing and I was having fun with clients and colleagues. There was real personal growth -- every year bigger than the one before, in every way. It was motivating, in the way that momentum always is.
Then about a decade in, it began leveling off. My salary stayed about the same each year. Some of the bigger growth opportunities, which would have taken me abroad, I had to turn down for personal reasons. I began to feel stagnant. The work became less dynamic, and my growth slowed. Every year began to seem the same.
And then I discovered that the climb of the early years was hiding something about my corporate reality I couldn’t see: how little control I actually had. The higher I got, it seemed paradoxically that the less control I had. A great year for me no longer guaranteed a great bonus — because it also depended on the performance of a division I didn’t run, and decisions made by people I’d never met. My financial destiny was tied to the broader performance of the company as a whole. Much of which I had nothing to do with.
I was left feeling that I only had two choices: leave the industry and find a new path, or stay and maximize my financial outcome for as long as I could. But realizing how little control I had over my personal financial outcome led to greater and greater frustration.
The frustration wasn’t just job-related. My father died during that same stretch. My mother was fighting a cancer that would eventually take her life. My kids were born. And in those difficult, joyful, hands-on years, I began to see something I hadn’t seen before.
I played with my kids any chance I got. There was such lightness and freedom in it. And I came to see in their innocence and joy how naturally creative they were. Handed a toy or two, they could build a whole world. Heck, they could do it even without a toy. A world that maybe I couldn’t see, but it was completely real to them.
And I realized that I once had that ability too. And somewhere along the way, I had forgotten it.
Perhaps it wasn’t my fault. Every year it seems, we devalue creativity a bit more. Schools eliminate arts programs when budgets get tight. The skills everyone wants nowadays are deemed to be the skills that make you “job-ready”. To be a good worker. More and more, our education system shows us simply how to get in line and follow instructions. Which bubbles on the test to fill in.
It turned out I was really good at doing what I was told. At making other people happy. But, as I watched my kids build their worlds out of nothing, I could see that their imagination and creativity wasn’t for anyone else. It was for them and them only. I came to realize what a gift that ability was -- and what a disservice we do to our children by encouraging them to abandon that instinct as they get older. To stop imagining or creating, because we’re afraid that it can’t get you a job or build stability into your life.
And here’s where I saw the connection to my career: I’d spent years building someone else’s vision. The idea someone else conjured up in their imagination. I was helping someone else create their something out of nothing. Maybe I was helping to make it more efficient, or more marketable. But it was never actually mine.
That’s when the pull to entrepreneurship became undeniable. Building a new business was something I could put my own unique stamp on. I could control my destiny from the ground floor. That was not just exciting, it was empowering. I was using parts of me that felt deeply familiar, yet had gone dormant. And I was starting to come back to something in myself I’d left behind a long time ago.
But this time, I wasn’t building alone the way I once might have needed to. I had a partner in the process. One that never got tired and didn’t care whose vision it was serving. If you’re a creator, someone who is imagining something that doesn’t exist yet and you need help making it real -- AI is the most enabling technology ever built. It removes the thing that’s always slowed creators down: the doing. The execution. The thousands of small obstacles that make people quit before the finished product sees the light of day. AI can think with you. It can build with you. What used to take a team months to accomplish now takes an afternoon.
But if you’re a doer — if your work has been making someone else’s vision real — AI might be the biggest threat you’ve ever faced. Because doing is exactly what AI is built for.
I want to be clear about something. This isn’t a dig at doers. I was one for most of my career. Doers are essential — we need people willing to take someone else’s vision and make it bigger and better than it would have been alone. That work is real, and it matters. Almost everything we experience is better because the doers put their stamp on it.
But it’s also the work AI is closing in on fastest. AI still can’t originate a vision. It can’t want or imagine something new. That part remains stubbornly and thankfully human. For now. But what AI can do really well is provide deep and extensive help to a creator who has a vision. And if execution was the whole of your value, that’s a problem.
So I think the uncomfortable question that AI forces us to reckon with is: whose vision have you been building? And maybe in that answer we discover the real gift of artificial intelligence. For years, we’ve built a society that trains the creator out of us. A society that rewards falling in line over imagining or creating something new. Maybe AI will be the thing that finally reverses it.
I think about my kids again, blissfully building a world I couldn’t see. How natural that was for them. We have all been that kid once. Maybe AI won’t just help us build things faster. Maybe it’ll return us to the thing we abandoned before we were old enough to recognize its value. Maybe it will be the catalyst that brings us back to the creators we were always born to be.
I remain hopeful.
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