Untitled, Unbounded and Untattooed:
Open to Radical Redefinition
What if the most radical act of living a portfolio life is not to be defined?
When algorithms train to anticipate our wants, our thoughts and even our words by distilling the complexity of us to the simple, is the most radical act refusing to be defined the most powerful?
My friend Ashley sent me a picture of herself and the thing that caught my eye was her beautiful tattoos. Both of us are deep in a stage of reinvention. We took opposing views of the tattoo and what it means.
We are trained from early to distill who we are into digestible packets, mostly around what we do. Who hasn’t from childhood not been asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I picture awkward Dustin Hoffman at a party with a shimmery blue pool in the background while Mr. McGuire says, “Plastics.”
As adults, it's no different. "So, what do you do?" It's the first question at every networking event, isn't it? As if that single answer could encapsulate the complexity of me. But it does.
Last year I became unemployed after the company I worked for was acquired by a PE company and run into the ground. That meant I could no longer fob off the Mr. McGuires of the world by explaining myself as a title. It led to some uncomfortable pauses in conversation at the inevitable question which I filled with, “I am looking for a job,” just to see the relief. My audience could put me in a familiar framework.
But if the Mr. McGuires of the world were willing to listen, what would my new framework for defining myself be? If I were to tattoo that identity on my arm, what would it say about me without words?
MBA. Tech Executive. Daughter. Unpaid caregiver. Sister. Aunt. Mother. Author. Introvert. Creative Pragmatist. Explorer. All true, all a flattened version of me. On any day I am 100 small acts of kindness and unkindess too.
This is why I have never wanted a tattoo - it is too fixed.
I am the potted tree replanted - a dynamic thing, unleashed and capable of evolving in ways that a fixed identity (or a tattoo) can't accommodate.
I've been grappling with this question of identity, of how we define ourselves in a world that demands easy categorization. This is an issue for my clients who have a platform that is bigger than their resume and W2. Your LinkedIn profile is supposed to sum up your professional worth, or your Instagram bio is meant to capture your essence in 150 characters or less. But how can we possibly distill the complexity of our experiences, our dreams, our contradictions into such limited spaces?
One of the things that captures my imagination about now is the possibility to redefine and rethink who we are and how we work. I think about Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who said,
“In my little group chat… there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company. Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.”
This means you, or I, or your 8-year-old daughter could build a company that rivals Microsoft from the luxury of the kitchen table between making oatmeal cookies. AI has removed barriers to entry like VC capital to fund a startup, developer talent to create a product, and even a board of directors. It is just you, your idea, and the customer or audience for whom what you do matters.
For me, I built an AI factory to help me create a book in 72 hours. The Edge Your Brain on AI became a bestseller in 6 days. I can reconceive how to get my book to market because of Kindle Direct Publishing. I can redefine a reader’s experience by adding AI chatbots per chapter for a reader to use to dive deeper, test chapter concepts and more as they explore ways to make AI impactful in meaningful ways.
I spoke to a filmmaker and producer about how to get his team to embrace the possible when the mood of the industry is to ostrich. I get it. Products like Runway and Descript make it possible to create video without a video editor… and if you define yourself as a video producer or editor, it is scary.
But what if you shift left?
What stories can you tell in ways not possible? When the ability to tell a story on film is no longer cost prohibitive, what does that enable?
How can you get your ideas to page (or film) differently? Like the iPhone camera changed what we captured and how AI does now. If you are already good, how much better at storytelling can you become?
Who could you reach now that would have been filtered out by financiers who demand the blockbuster and write script notes that take your originality away?
For my shift, it isn’t about AI redefining my work, a role, or even writing my story. One of the most powerful ways I use AI and the skill I built in making it relate to me, is to break through the mental barriers I have about my sense of self. I challenge my myths about who I am and who I could be.
After 40 plus years of feeling crummy about my weight and my body, I created a mindchanger GPT who weighed in with a hug, help or a hooray, depending on what I needed. NOTE: I do not suggest AI as a replacement for clinical expertise.
There is something about the immediacy - I can text or “talk” to my Mindchanger bot any time - and she is tailored to know my fears and myths I am trying to overcome. This gets me out of my limbic brain - the part of my brain responsible for my emotional reactions - into my rational brain.
My friend Ashley, who wrote the companion piece here, and I are seekers on different paths. Her tattoos are a way of reclaiming herself. My lack of tattoos is a refusal to be pinned and permanent.
Conclusion: Challenge and Embrace Your Fluid Identity
Our digital footprints often seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Who hasn’t had a moment where they find the perfect inspiration staring at them just by opening Instagram. It is intoxicating to be seen and heard - even by a social media algorithm
But it's up to us to examine, discard or reconstitute what makes us us.
I help clients and myself get from thoughts to execution differently. As a former tech executive who built complex storage and data center supply chain and manufacturing operations to drive hundreds of millions of dollars, I apply the same systemic approach to people and businesses that want to get from thought to action or page and how AI can be used to operationalize it.
Check out my best selling book - The Edge Your Brain on AI by Betsy Tong. I would love a review, and if you do, send me an email to betsy@ignite-ai.co with the link to your review, and I will send you our free PDF CustomGPTs for you to play with.
#optionalitylife,
Nice!