“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs
Every parent I talk to is asking the same thing: What should my child study to thrive in the age of AI?
Here’s the truth that no one’s saying out loud: Your children are arriving at exactly the right moment. Not despite AI, but because of it.
Morgan Stanley cut their analyst program by 40%. McKinsey halved their junior positions. Entry-level journalism jobs vanished overnight. But here’s what the headlines miss: these weren’t careers being destroyed. They were obstacles being removed.
AI didn’t kill these jobs. It exposed them as expensive theater. We charged kids $280,000 for degrees, paid them $65,000 to build pitch decks until their eyes bled, and called it “paying dues.” Investment banking analysts weren’t learning finance. They were learning to survive on four hours of sleep. Junior consultants weren’t learning strategy. They were learning to speak McKinsey.
These weren’t careers. They were hazing rituals with healthcare.
And now they’re gone. Which means your children get to skip to the good part.
The Only Skill That Survives
Forget coding. Forget prompt engineering. Forget whatever “future-proof” skill LinkedIn is peddling this month.
The most valuable trait in the AI age isn’t technical. It’s grit.
The ability to ship something broken and fix it live. To watch your first idea fail and immediately start the second. To get rejected by ninety-nine customers and still pitch the hundredth.
AI can write perfect code. It can’t push through the sixteenth iteration when the first fifteen failed. AI can generate flawless strategies. It can’t find the will to execute when everything goes wrong.
Grit is the gap AI can never close.
The Compression of Everything
What once required ten people now takes one with AI. What demanded years of apprenticeship needs an afternoon on YouTube.
This isn’t replacement. It’s leverage. Your children aren’t competing with AI, they’re compounding with it. They can build companies from dorm rooms that would have required twenty employees and $5M in funding just five years ago. They can reach millions directly, immediately, without intermediaries.
But tools without tenacity are just toys. The builders who matter are the ones willing to ship when it’s embarrassing, message a thousand potential customers, pivot when the first idea dies.
Our daughter is a sophomore at Wake Forest. Sociology major, business concentration, minors in Marketing and Economics. She’s not learning to code, she’s learning to decode humans: how people group, why they buy, what makes culture shift.
She can prompt AI to build any app she imagines. But knowing what people actually want, having the patience to talk to hundreds until patterns emerge, building version after version until something clicks, that’s her edge. She built the only stack that matters: human insight, AI leverage, and the grit to iterate until it works.
Ownership Requires Endurance
The founders who matter now aren’t the ones with perfect LinkedIn profiles. They’re the ones with customers.
Revenue is the new GPA.
Customer love is the new letter of recommendation. And persistence is the new pedigree.
Software can’t wake up at 3 AM sick about a bad decision. Can’t feel shame when code ships broken. Can’t make the call that ruins a friendship but saves a company. You can’t automate accountability. You can’t scale conviction. You can’t code caring.
Most importantly, you can’t code the choice to keep going when every signal says stop. That choice, the human choice to persist through failure, is the only moat that matters.
The Beautiful Chaos Ahead
There’s no roadmap anymore. That’s not terrifying, it’s liberating. Your children don’t have to follow someone else’s playbook. They get to write their own.
The ones who thrive won’t be those who picked the perfect major. They’ll be the ones who iterate until they find what works. Who combine human insight with AI leverage. Who ship instead of plan. Who learn to be bad at something new rather than good at something obsolete.
Many will have careers that don’t have names because they’ll be the first to do them. The common thread won’t be their credentials. It will be their refusal to quit.
The Promise of This Moment
Your children have better tools than we ever did. Faster feedback loops. Lower barriers. AI as their collaborator.
They can build in a weekend what took us months. Reach audiences we couldn’t dream of. Solve problems at scales we couldn’t imagine.
The hazing rituals are dead. The gatekeepers are gone. The ladder doesn’t exist.
Good.
Your children don’t need to pay dues. They need to create value. They don’t need to wait their turn. They need to ship. They don’t need credentials. They need customers.
We built POPSUGAR because we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. No experience, no connections, no blueprint. Just the stubbornness to keep posting when everyone said blogs wouldn’t become real businesses. That stubbornness turned into one of the largest media companies of its generation.
Your children have something we didn’t: tools that turn stubbornness into superpowers. They don’t need six months to find an audience. They need six hours. They don’t need venture funding to test an idea. They need the kind of determination that makes venture funding chase them.
They’re the luckiest generation in human history. Not because it’s easier, but because it’s clearer. The path from idea to impact has never been shorter.
And so are you. Because you get to watch them build things that matter, solve problems that persist, create futures we can’t imagine. Not because they’re brilliant, though they might be. But because they won’t stop.
The future isn’t coming, it’s being built right now.
And that future will be magnificent.
Beautiful post, read this as I sit here with my 7 year old doing Origami 3 hours straight from a new channel he found. I’m bullish on their future.
Opportunity knocks!