by Caroline Stauss

I’ve almost completely by-the-books transitioned into a new job as a many-hat wearing operations and curriculum specialist/company co-owner as someone who has spent her entire career as a many-position holding educator. Almost because first, the Netherlands gets to dictate my start date, and thus my first paycheck date, and that isn’t until September. So technically, I guess you’d say I’m still an operations and curriculum volunteer.

Almost, too, because I’ve almost always lived by the oppressive dictum that those who can’t do, teach. Being in such a career fully demonstrated the opposite, of course, and truly conventional wisdom would toss out this adage. Even while I lived under the dictatorship of this sentiment –impostor syndrome being the hallmark of my generation–I could see that my colleagues were the biggest doers I’d ever met. I never really saw teaching as a job. It was a calling that spilled into every part of my identity. Despite anything you’ve heard [me say], teaching had incredibly high job satisfaction for me. 

So almost means I now have a job title that includes the word “operations,” which is another word for “doing.” Now, how does someone who has entrenched her identity in professionally *not* doing, or simply not wanting to do, make this transition into entrepreneurship (another word for doing, basically, but in French)?

I’ll give you a guess… it starts with A, and ends in …rtificial intelligence!

This should seem quite inferable, given that the business we’ve built is for the express purpose of teaching people how to use AI. 

But as someone who’s also taken a lot of pride in the excitement around the curiosity and knowledge I have pursued in my lifetime (why else would I want to work in education, academia, and journalism?), I am not blind to the rightful conclusions drawn by many of my very wise and hardworking peers–AI makes you suck at things. AI risks your livelihood. AI calcifies divisions between labor and capital. AI spews filth into the atmosphere and leaves communities to deal with the wreckage. AI uses too many emdashes. (I just changed my emdash into a colon just to stave off any suspicion, not that I should. Eff it, I’m changing it back!)

It’s been a crazy year. Along with my beginning this professional transition and leaving my educator position behind, we put in a tremendous amount of effort to move ourselves as individuals and our business itself to a country overseas with a rather strange language and eerily non-strange people. I’d endured months of shake-ups, abortive attempts to stay on top of all the processes of *operating* a business, and finally settling after enduring seeking a home in one of the most challenging housing markets in the world. When it was finally time to really re-invest in what’s coming next for our company, I had an emotional breakdown, wherein I railed against AI and how insidiously it’s contributed to my own brain rot.

Not the best look for my very patient partner, who has somehow tolerated my personal and now very closely knit professional crises for nearly thirteen years.

As I embark (and will be slow to disembark) this protean riptide of personal and professional identities–see, even my metaphors are getting slippery–so many folks have reminded me about giving myself grace. Even AI does this reflexively, telling me how well I’ve managed to become a marketing strategist or have come up with tremendously creative ideas that ChatGPT actually kindled. And so, with the residue of uncertainty and the survival mechanisms associated with impostor syndrome, I am trying to give myself a little bit more credit for what I have achieved. But I can’t ignore that AI was an accelerant for these outcomes, both positive and negative.

I am now proud to take on the mantle of this skepticism on behalf of my company who has seen its other employees generally enriched by the experience of AI. I am also happy to see our brand leaning into this skepticism by developing a course based around the manifold risks of AI (and how to mitigate them, given the fact that AI in the workplace is decidedly not going away).

*And* I’m happy to see that I am still capable of the passionate, nerdy and decidedly un-brain-rotted energy of lesson-planning with a whiteboard and sticky notes. Now I do it not simply as a teacher, but with the authority of an owner. A doer.