you're so behind
at accepting the things you can't control
There was a time a year or so ago when you couldn’t escape the 0% funny and 100% ubiquitous comment people would make in response to any workplace grievance: “I’m just gonna quit and do OnlyFans.” 99% of these people had no intention to ever do such a thing, because if they knew how much work it required, they wouldn’t have alluded to it being some easy alternative to whatever mild corporate inconvenience they were going through in the first place.
The reason I mention this is because there’s a new one-liner in town that, like its predecessor, manages to sum up public sentiment about an entire new industry. Except this time it’s 0% funny because it feels 100% true: “I need to quit my job to learn AI.”
The concept of needing to be unemployed to get ahead professionally feels spiritually similar to needing to drop out of Stanford to raise money for your startup (derogatory). I can relate to the dropping out part, but I did it so I could move to Brooklyn for a guy I just met 2 weeks before, which is what I think 20 year olds should be doing. Let kids be kids, etc.
The concept of being able to master something when you have unlimited swaths of free time to dedicate to it is no more true of AI than any other skill/area/whatever. Not to mention the half-life of “AI mastery” is shorter than the high you experience from most illegal drugs, given how quickly the industry is moving.
My point is you don’t need 40 hours a week to learn AI and you can even do this while employed…in fact I recommend it!
Barrie’s Best Practices as you Learn to Build:
DO schedule 2-3 hours once a week to focus on learning, experimenting, and building. Try to block one chunk of time, as context switching into this work for shorter periods can prevent deep-diving into something.
DO prioritize problems that you run into repeatedly.
DO prioritize experimenting with one single interesting feature, if you’re not going the problem-solving route from above.
DON’T spend this time trying to ‘catch up’ on all the new stuff in the space. This is for the unemployed people.
DON’T waste time asking AI to do something again and again if it didn’t get it 100% right. Take the 70% W and finish the rest manually. Also this is how you keep your DNA in your work which is very important (and fulfilling and fun).
Most importantly…be easy on yourself. Make sure any voices you’re following online aren’t yelling at you. If every sentence starts with “Claude Code just killed <insert new tool you just learned>,” smash that unfollow. Remember that a lot of AI news is actually written with AI, and is genetically engineered in a lab to make you feel scared.
If you feel overwhelmed, focus on a small problem you can solve, throw some time on the calendar (or mine!), and go from there.
