2 Lessons from a Timeless Parable, 3 Reasons to Check Your Credit Report, How to Stop Working So Much, and More

Two close boyhood friends grow up and go their separate ways. One becomes a humble monk, the other a rich and powerful minister to the king.

Years later they meet. As they catch up, the minister (in his fine robes) takes pity on the thin, shabby monk. Seeking to help, he says:

“You know, if you could learn to cater to the king you wouldn’t have to live on rice and beans.”

To which the monk replies:

“If you could learn to live on rice and beans you wouldn’t have to cater to the king.”

“The number of meetings people logged after 8 p.m. over the 12 months through February, in fact, were up 16% from the year before, according to new data from Microsoft on the activity of millions of workers who use the company’s business applications. By 10 p.m., nearly a third of them were back in their inboxes after pausing for dinner or home duties.“

“Mentions of burnout by employees on job-review site Glassdoor, meanwhile, jumped 32% in the first quarter from a year earlier, hitting their highest levels in nearly a decade.”

“A cooling white-collar job market has made it harder for others to push back on more work. In a Gallup survey of more than 10,000 workers last summer, 63% said they had been asked to take on additional responsibilities, up from 47% in early 2023.”

“…As human beings, we are hardwired to help and conditioned to be cooperative. We believe that saying yes means we’re a team player, a good friend, a successful professional. Refusing seems like it isn’t an option and will bring terrible consequences.

But saying yes to things we don’t want to do also has terrible consequences—it can make us unhappy and resentful.”

1. “First, do some self-examination: Figure out your principles and set rules for sticking to them. You might set up a rule to maintain the quality of work you do: ‘I don’t take on new projects till I am well under way with my progress on the ones already on my plate.’ Or establish a personal policy that helps you maintain better work-life harmony: ‘I don’t take calls or meetings after 6 p.m. or on the weekends, because that is family time.’”

2. “Then, when you do refuse, frame your response with empowered language. For instance, use ‘I don’t,’ not ‘I can’t,’ which signals that your ‘no’ stems from who you are and the rules you have set for yourself. Communicate that the refusal stems from our core principles rather than mere convenience.

‘I can’t’ suggests helplessness and temporary obstacles. When you say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ it often raises the question ‘Why not?’ and invites negotiation. Also, don’t give excuses when you say no. It invites questions. Instead, be firm and resolute. If you say, for instance, you are too busy now, you leave the door to the other person asking again.”

“Commentators have become increasingly bleak about the future of human work in an A.I. world. The venture-capitalist investor Chris Sacca recently went on Tim Ferriss’s podcast and declared that ‘we are super [expletive].’ He suggested that computer programmers, lawyers, accountants, marketing copywriters and most other white-collar workers were all doomed. In an email to his staff, Fiverr’s chief executive, Micha Kaufman, added designers and salespeople to the list of the soon-to-be-damned.”

“If we want to know what these new opportunities will be, we should start by looking at where new jobs can bridge the gap between A.I.’s phenomenal capabilities and our very human needs and desires. It’s not just a question of where humans want A.I., but also: Where does A.I. want humans? To my mind, there are three major areas where humans either are, or will soon be, more necessary than ever: trust, integration and taste.”

1. Robert Seamans, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who studies the economic consequences of A.I., envisions a new set of roles he calls A.I. auditors — people who dig down into the A.I. to understand what it is doing and why and can then document it for technical, explanatory or liability purposes. Within the next five years, he told me, he suspects that all big accounting firms will include “A.I. audits” among their offerings.

2. Given the complexity of A.I., many of the new jobs will be technical in nature. There will be a great need for people who deeply understand A.I. and can map that knowledge into business needs.

Seamans calls this group the A.I. integrators: experts who figure out how to best use A.I. in a company, then implement it.

3. It will remain a human’s job, of course, to tell the A.I. what to do. But telling A.I. what to do requires having a vision for exactly what you want. In a future where most of us have access to the same generative tools, taste will become incredibly important.

When creative options are nearly limitless, people with the ability to make bold, stylish choices will be in demand. And this will be true not just for creative industries such as writing, filmmaking and advertising but for business of all kinds. Knowing what you want — and having a sense of what will resonate with customers — will be the core human role in developing products and systems.

Rather than go away, in the future, the term “designer” might actually grow to cover a whole range of jobs in which a person’s main function is to steer A.I. to create something compelling — a product, a service, a process — based largely on their taste.”

What's 1 area of spending that brings you a disproportionate amount of joy? Are there ways you could find to spend more in this area?