we are the pattern

I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’m being left behind.

I have been incredibly lucky that I stumbled into a role I excel at. What I mean is, I have ended up where I am today not as a conscious decision or personal goal that I set for myself - but through being afforded the opportunity to explore & discover what I am good at.

I didn’t plan on getting involved with technology, I didn’t plan to manage the development of software. I got here simply because every day at work I would have a nagging thought, “there has to be a better way to do this” - which led to teaching myself how to code, which led to re-designing processes & systems, which led to reduced friction, repeatable automations, and streamlined processes.

Maybe that’s ingenuity. Maybe it’s innovation. Maybe it’s pure sloth.

Perhaps a combination of all three? Likely driven by sloth… There is an old quote that essentially says, “Choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easier way to do it.”

My point is this. I arrived at a point of creating value in my career through the opportunity to learn by doing. To try things, fail and try again. To experiment and learn.

Today, AI is rapidly changing that landscape.

The barrier to experimentation and learning is lowering at an unprecedented rate. But many industries are not keeping pace with the rate of change. Workforces are stagnating - not through lack of drive, but lack of opportunity to fail and try again.

This is the whole reason I have built myself a home lab. This is the reason I built a (mostly) new computer with two RTX 3090 GPUs; the reason I’m spending an unholy amount of money every month for personal subscriptions to frontier AI companies; the reason I’m waking up early & staying up late reading, experimenting, failing, learning.

Not because I’m having fun (let’s be real, I’m having an incredible amount of fun) - but because the world is changing, many professional industries are lagging behind, and the skills gap is widening fast. Watching from the sidelines is not something I’m good at. But without all my extracurricular activities - it’s where I would be. So I’m fighting like hell to keep my head above water.

I want to be very clear that this is not a criticism of industry/organisational policy. There are real concerns around responsible use of AI, and probably several other angles I cannot see with my blinders on.

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but I know I’m not alone. A recent survey of 1,250 office professionals across four countries found that nearly 9 in 10 who use AI for work first encountered it in their personal lives. The entire wave of adoption is flowing through people’s evenings and weekends - through home labs, personal subscriptions, and sheer refusal to fall behind - before it ever reaches their desks.

So if you’re doing the same - waking up early, staying up late, spending your own money to learn tools your industry can’t give you yet - you’re not alone. We are the pattern.