Hello fellow dads! After I sent my newsletter on hanging up my bike last week, several of you reached out. You shared that you have been going through the same phase, learning to give up parts of your old selves and being thankful for what those parts were replaced by (i.e. your children!). I appreciate those messages because I feel more connected to you fellow parents.
I did have a follow-up thought. While I’m at peace with giving up my hobbies like cycling, I do feel conflicted about one thing: Looking after my parents and the elders in my family. My wife and I have been so overwhelmed with caring for two kids that we barely have capacity for our work, let alone thinking about others. But at the same time, we often lean on our parents and relatives when we need help, and they are getting old.
I don’t have a good answer to this yet. If you are in a similar situation, I’d love to hear how you have been thinking or coping with this.
Alfred
What I am teaching my children in the age of AI
“Where are you on the spectrum about AI?” a fellow founder dad asked me recently.
“Oh, I wish AI would take away jobs more quickly,” I replied immediately.
Regardless of what you and I feel about AI, it has already been taking away some jobs. Verifiable work like programming and mathematics is increasingly solved by better models and compute, not humans. My friends in various industries, from private investments to consulting to IT, told me that their companies have been cutting back on entry-level jobs. As a knowledge worker myself, I can see AI doing most—if not all—of my work eventually.
If we are being honest, a lot of work in the knowledge economy today isn’t actually productive. My friend recently joined a big corporation. She had to wait four weeks to get her email account set up. That was after repeated visits to the HR department, which directed her to the IT department, which directed her to the outsourced IT vendor—which raised at least five tickets for her, each to expedite the previous ticket. Sure, many phone calls were made, many emails were sent, many tickets were raised. But how much work was actually done? How much could be automated?
As AI continues to handle more knowledge work for us, technical skills and academic knowledge will become less important. In that case, what is there left for us humans to do?
More importantly, what will be valuable for us to teach our children in such an uncertain future?
For me, I’m glad we can finally shift our focus from pressuring kids over grades to teaching them something more important:
Practical wisdom.
That is what I’m teaching my children.
Being a good person
My parents have been running their car workshop for almost 40 years. Even though I’m an entrepreneur like they are, they never taught me the technical skills of running a successful business. Instead, they focused on raising me to be a good person: someone with morals, kindness, and humility. Perhaps worrying that I might forget that, they named me 勇德 (Yong De), which means courage and virtue.
In the Confucian classic Great Learning (大学), there is a teaching: 修身、齐家、治国、平天下, which translates to cultivate the self, regulate the family, govern the state, and bring peace to the world. If we cannot master our own mind and body, we cannot help others. If we cannot bring order to our own home, we cannot lead others. Our personal development forms the foundation of everything else we do. Major scandals like Enron, Theranos, and FTX have shown us what happens when smart people lack the right foundation.
But cultivating the self isn’t just an intellectual or ethical exercise. Our mind has to be supported by a resilient body. Are we eating healthily and staying active, or are we destroying our body with vices? Taking care of our body is a moral responsibility to ourselves and the people who rely on us, especially our children.
Dealing with life
Maybe AI will eliminate tedious tasks in our lives. But I doubt it can eradicate all hardships, challenges, and failures. As Charlie Munger once said, “The iron rule of life is everybody struggles.” What do we do when we find out we have terminal cancer? Can we regulate our emotions when our children make us angry? How do we deal with envy when we see our schoolmate buy another new house and car?
Greek and Roman philosophers practiced hypomnēmata to help with this. The practitioner keeps a notebook to record the things they read, heard, or thought. Then, they regularly reread and reflect on those passages to regulate their mind and shape their conduct. For example, to deal with stress and frustration, they might meditate on a passage that reminds them they cannot control external events but they can control their own emotions. One of the most famous practitioners is Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote notes to himself as he led a decade-long military campaign along the Danube River and dealt with the devastating Antonine Plague.
This is a big part of why I have been writing about practical wisdom daily. I realized that practical wisdom sounds easy but is very hard to do well and consistently. It is one thing to know we can only control our emotions and not external events. It’s another to actually remember to regulate our emotions in the heat of the moment. So I started writing these short notes to remind myself of the practical wisdom I want to internalize, like not feeling sorry for myself, modeling the right behavior for my children, and doing the work myself.
Connecting with others
In 2013, I read a little book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. It might seem silly that I had to read a book to learn how to make friends. I’d argue the opposite. Given how important social skills are, it’s odd that we aren’t taught them as part of our formal education. What do we do when we get into an argument with our spouse? How do we support a grieving friend? How do we maintain a conversation with a stranger? Some people might naturally be better at these than others. But we can all learn to be better. For instance, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People taught me that love is a verb, not a passive emotion or noun. You might laugh at me for needing to learn how to love from a book, but I have seen enough couples who don’t understand this.
My wife is an emergency doctor, who regularly has to tell strangers that their loved one has died or patients that they have critical illnesses. You can’t just walk up to them and tell them directly. In healthcare, medical professionals are taught the SPIKES framework for breaking bad news. First, you Set up the interview by choosing a suitable environment and building rapport with the other party. Then, you ask what they know so far (Perception) and how much they want to know (Invitation). Next, you provide medical facts at a level they can understand (Knowledge) and explore their Emotions with empathy. Finally, you agree on a Strategy and Summarize the discussion. Granted, AI might soon diagnose all conditions better than human doctors. But would you want to be informed that you have cancer by an automated voice from a screen on the wall?
Even though I don’t think our children will pick up most of their knowledge from school, schools are still valuable for providing an environment for practicing many social skills. I never used my university degree in any meaningful way. But this isn’t to say my time at university was useless. It was invaluable for things beyond academics, such as immersing myself in a different culture, interacting with people from all over the world, and learning to make friends. Could I have done all that without paying for the degree? It is possible, but it is hard to find another social setting with the same elements—people of roughly the same age forced into the same space.
Learning to learn
My core technical skills—software marketing and creating SaaS—didn’t exist in my parents’ generation. The general use of the World Wide Web only started a few years after I was born. Salesforce popularized the SaaS model when I was seven. And I was 12 when Facebook launched. My parents could not have predicted which technical skills would become valuable and taught me accordingly. Similarly, there will likely be valuable technical skills in the future that don’t exist today. The key, then, is learning to learn.
In Dune, there is a famous passage on learning how to learn:
Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
We don’t know what the future will look like as AI continues to improve. Even the next five years might look drastically different from the past five. But if we can master the metaskill of learning, then we will be okay.
There is another step up from there: Not just learning to learn but being curious and proactive. There has always been a gap between people who are satisfied with what little they know and people who actively seek out knowledge and wisdom—even just for fun. Why does the rainbow have seven colors, or why does the moon change its shape every night, or why does a magnet attract a piece of metal? AI will widen the gap much further as all information becomes even more accessible than what Google offered. All of us already have a perfectly patient teacher in our pockets; the only question is whether we are using it.
Living a good and useful life
In 2024, my former colleague injured his lower back. It was so painful that he could barely get up and walk. Since he couldn’t exercise, he put on more weight than he ever had. The worst part was he could no longer chase his kids around.
He tried every stretch and exercise his physical therapist gave him. But nothing worked. So he took matters into his own hands. He sought out alternative approaches, found Tai Chi, and researched 30 movements to try. After doing it consistently for almost 300 days, his back pain went away and he lost 22 lbs! In the process, frustrated by existing habit trackers, he teamed up with another former colleague to create an app that helps him show up daily.
I wanted to share his story because it is a great example of almost everything I shared above. He faced adversity. He wanted to look after his body and family. So he searched and learned a new solution. Then, he built a life-changing habit while working with a former colleague across the Atlantic.
(He doesn’t even know I’m sharing this. But, Spencer, if you are reading this, really amazing work! Thanks for the inspiration!)
As French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in On the Education of Children, academic subjects have their usefulness, but education should prioritize practical wisdom and character development because those have a direct use in our daily lives. It should teach us how to live a good and useful life.
At the end of the day, whether AI replaces us economically or not, isn’t living a good and useful life what matters most?
This week’s daily reminders
Day 15: AI can never do this
Day 18: It’s only a moment
Day 19: You have everything you wanted
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P.S. Want to come back to this later? Keep it in your commonplace book.