🛠️ Career Strategy

Is Gen Z Unemployable?

I’m trying something new today - I’m going to react to someone else’s career advice. Read this post from NYU professor Suzy Welch.

Someone in the comments beat me to the punch. As Alex van Kooy put it, “‘love of work for work’s sake’ is delusional.”

No one actually works “for work’s sake.” Not the overachiever putting in eighty-hour weeks, not the office lifer coasting till Friday, not even the “personality type” Suzy gestures at. People work for rewards. Sometimes it’s prestige, sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s the sense of progress or mastery, or just the basic security of a paycheck. But to claim there’s this special class of people who “just love to work,” and that everyone else is either chasing that feeling or should just accept their lot, is misleading at best and ragebait at worst.

You don’t have to buy into this. “Loving work for work’s sake” is idiotic; it will not get you that new job or shiny promotion. The system isn’t rewarding the people who work the hardest or love the job the most. It’s not even rewarding those who tick all the right boxes.

It rewards people who understand that every job is a business transaction, and that the winners are those who tie their work to real impact. Prestige, compensation, optionality: these come from playing the game on its actual terms, not by clinging to some Calvinist fantasy of labor as virtue.

Welch’s framing lets the system off the hook. If you’re tired and burned out, that’s just because you’re “normal,” and maybe you should have been born with a different personality. In reality, the market is structured to squeeze as much as possible out of as many people as possible, while promoting the myth that loving work is the only path to meaning.

If you want to get ahead, stop waiting for work to love you back. Stop looking for the magic job that will fill your soul. Start thinking like a strategist. Tie your effort to outcomes that matter. Use commercial rigor, which I talked about earlier this month.

That’s how you win. Everything else is just noise.

🤖 AI Tactic

Personality Profiles, Instantly 🔎 

Note: We’ve added hundreds of subscribers since I shared this last and I want more people to know this is possible.

If you, like me, are interested in personality tests, you’ll enjoy today’s prompt example. While I know personality tests are basically junk science, I like them in the way that some people like horoscopes. Obviously, they’re an entertaining way to seek self-knowledge. And as long as people see themselves in the results, you can use them to reason about people.

The trouble is that these tests can be really expensive. To do a battery of tests that I consider interesting (MBTI, OCEAN, Color Code, Clifton, Enneagram, Basadur, HBDI, VIA, Instinctive Drives, SVI), the cost for the most basic test versions is a total $500. If you want a more thorough test, more detailed results, or a facilitator to help you understand the results, it gets significantly more expensive.

I like saving money and I bet you do too. So let’s get into it. Two notes upfront:

1. I’d recommend using ChatGPT 3o because it spends more time reasoning (though it will sandbag how confident it is in your results).

2. This prompt requires you to use ChatGPT a lot, so there is enough memory to draw conclusions from (I have thousands of chats, but hundreds will likely suffice).

Here’s the prompt:

If you want the prompt, please sign up for the newsletter :) 

🧠 Curiosity Corner

Advanced Nano-Banana Usage 🍌 

Most users simply type lengthy descriptions and hope for good results with image models like Gemini Nano-Banana. However, there's a more effective approach: JSON prompts.

JSON prompts organize your ideas into structured elements rather than run-on sentences. This structured format helps the model better understand your intentions, resulting in cleaner, more precise outputs.

The advantage is simple: instead of overwhelming the model with one complicated paragraph, JSON compartmentalizes your requirements for AI.

Here’s a great guide on how to do it.

Once you get good, you can compose shots like putting the Eiffel Tower in Tokyo:

That’s it for this week.

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

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