As part of my mission this week to bring you some alternative thinking regarding wisdom in the era of AI, I’ve done a lot of reading (it helps to have flown to the Middle East and back in the past ten days) and rejoiced when I read this piece with the title of today’s post.
As my friend and fellow wisdom school booster Nico Michaelsen wrote in a recent blog post:
“We are entering the largest reskilling moment in human history. The Industrial Revolution reskilled 100 million workers. This one affects over 1 billion. And unlike past transitions, this time it’s not just about new skills, it’s about cultivating human depth.”
Joe Hudson, who works with AI founders and execs, writes in his piece:
“Today, as models swallow entire fields overnight, wisdom—skills like emotional clarity, discernment, and connection—is what keeps you indispensable. As CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella made it a priority to instill these capacities throughout his organization. In eight years, the company’s market capitalization climbed from $300 billion to $3 trillion.” (actually, Microsoft just surpassed $4 trillion!)
The first initiative Satya Nadella put in place as the new CEO wasn’t to cut costs or hire McKinsey to do a market study. He knew that with Steve Ballmer as the prior CEO, the company was full of people with sharp elbows and narrow minds. Everyone was trying to prove themselves. Without referring to any early-stage AI or other technology, he trusted what he was seeing: a company that had a fixed mindset and he chose to create an enormous project of training everyone on how to adopt a growth mindset and emotional intelligence. He might have read the Google study (Project Aristotle) that showed that the most effective teams have one thing in common: psychological safety. Satya Nadella doubled-down on creating a humane company culture and it’s paid off.
Joe Hudson continues to amplify how human wisdom is meant to be the counterbalance to artificial intelligence,
“Wisdom is how to live. It is the residue of mistakes, metabolized by time and reflection. It is an embodied—as in felt in the body—experience, guidance from the inside. No matter how intelligent AI becomes, it can’t live your life for you. It can’t feel your body’s signal in a high-stakes negotiation, sense the hidden fear in a boardroom, or hear the unspoken “no” behind a client’s polite words. That’s why tomorrow’s economy will prize wisdom workers.”
And, he highlights the three core skills of wisdom workers: emotional clarity, discernment, and connection.
Emotional clarity: Learn how to take your emotions seriously, not literally. It is the ability to recognize your emotions, feel them, and move forward unobstructed.
Discernment: Discernment goes beyond what is true in the stacks of data. It is the ability to see things clearly and zero in on what matters.
Connection: Vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder (VIEW). People want deep relational presence—the ability to attune to others, see and be seen, and create safety even when pressure is high.
Joe continues,
“While people do grow attached to chatbots and develop bonds that soothe loneliness, these connections are fundamentally parasocial and transactional: The flow of care moves in one direction; AI has no skin in the game. Deep connection demands mutual, embodied relational presence—nervous systems coregulating through micro-expressions, tone shifts, and even subtle changes in breathing. AI can model supportive language, but it cannot feel surprise when you walk into the room, nor does its pulse quicken when you share bad news.”
The article ends with these two powerful sentences that remind me why MEA exists:
“Inner work isn’t just a personal growth tool anymore. It’s a strategic imperative.”
-Chip
P.S. What if mythologist Joseph Campbell were alive and you could ask him about AI, what question would you ask? You have a close approximation to that experience the first week of Sept in Santa Fe as the world’s best known living mythologist Michael Meade joins us at MEA Sept 1-6 in a workshop called Decode Your Mythology: Shape Your Future. Here’s a podcast episode from Michael from last week, Purpose and the Waking Soul, that helps us to see how much more important Purpose is in times like these. Here’s a blog post I wrote about Michael last month, Michael Meade: Our Modern-Day Joseph Campbell.
P.P.S. My most recent MIDLIFE CHRYSALIS podcast features a conversation with me and Sara Blakely, arguably the most successful female entrepreneur in the U.S. This week’s episode will go live tomorrow with me talking with one of the world’s best-known coaches and authors, Martha Beck.