Reflections on the Future of Work (And What I'm Telling My Kids)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the “entry-level” workforce will look like a decade or two from now. As a parent, I find myself constantly filtering my professional experiences — across consulting and life sciences — through one specific lens: what skills will actually matter when my children graduate?

We are living through the most significant structural shift in decades. I’ve watched it reshape workflows in real time: analyses that once took analyst teams a week now take hours, regulatory documents that required rooms full of medical writers are being drafted by LLMs, clinical trial data that sat locked in PDFs is now queryable in seconds. The impact on knowledge workers isn’t a future problem. It’s already here.

But as I look at the landscape, the most important skill isn’t a technical one. Curiosity is becoming a more stable currency than compliance — and that changes what I want my children to build.

Build the Mindmap First

AI is exceptional at the “how.” It doesn’t yet answers the “why.” To stay grounded — both intellectually and professionally — I want my kids to invest heavily in understanding how the world actually works before they optimize for any particular tool or workflow.

This means connecting dots across long time horizons, not just reacting to the news cycle. It means building foundational anchors - science, math, arts, history, philosophy - they’re the kind of deep-dive context that lets you make sense of what’s new without losing sight of first principles. The ability to link history to strategy — to reason backwards and forwards — is what creates clarity in a noisy world.

This isn’t about memorizing facts. It’s about having enough mental scaffolding that when something genuinely new appears, you can place it.

Then Develop a Bias for Action

Once you have the foundations, the next imperative is to build things. Not consume — build.

I’ve learned more from building custom tools in my own work than from any framework or methodology course. The most rewarding moments in my career haven’t come from following a manual; they’ve come from the moments of diving into something unfamiliar and figuring it out as I go. That instinct — to prototype, experiment, and iterate rather than wait until you’re fully ready — is what I want my children to internalize.

The goal is to be a builder. Whether that’s playing with code, experimenting with LLM workflows, or just shipping something imperfect and learning from it. The people who will thrive aren’t those who mastered today’s tools — it’s those who are comfortable picking up whatever comes next.

The Great Empowerment

Despite the displacement headlines, I’m genuinely optimistic about where this goes.

A single researcher in life sciences or a junior analyst in consulting can now wield capabilities that previously required an entire department. That’s not about doing more work — it’s about being able to chase bigger, more complex ideas earlier in a career. The ceiling on what an individual can accomplish has risen dramatically, and it will keep rising.

I see a future where intellectual leverage is broadly distributed. Where curiosity and initiative matter more than institutional access. Where a 22-year-old with the right mindset can contribute meaningfully to problems that previously took decades of seniority to even get close to.

What I’m Actually Telling My Kids

I don’t have all the answers for whenever they graduate — the landscape will look different by then. But the through-line I keep coming back to is this: stay grounded in foundations, keep your hands on the tools, and never stop being the person who asks why.

The future isn’t a threat to navigate around. It’s a massive, open-ended project — and the best time to start building is now.