The Explorer-Practitioner: building a career in the AI economy
Work is the backbone of our identity, relationships, and financial stability.
As much as some thought leaders and influencers try to reduce work to something utilitarian (a means to earn money, put a roof over our heads, and get on with life), work has evolved over the last few hundred years into a central part of how we invest our time and efforts.
It's the framework through which we develop, form social bonds, and find some answers about our own value. We have many expectations from our workplaces.
Things might be changing though. Just when we started asking even more from work, the ground beneath our feet started shifting. I promise you it's not just because of AI.
The fulfillment-fragility paradox
You probably know the statistics.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 22% of global jobs will undergo structural transformation by 2030.
Roughly 92 million roles will be eliminated, 170 million will be created, and 39% of the skills required today will become obsolete or radically transform. Artificial intelligence, geo-economic fragmentation, demographic shifts, and a confusing green transition are rewriting the rules of the game.
Some professions are built on know-how that technology can easily replicate. They're dying. Others, built entirely on creative thinking, find themselves vulnerable now that generative models can produce text, images, code, and analysis at near-zero marginal cost.
Professions that seemed safe a decade ago are now up for debate. Many traditional professions are safer (e.g, plumbing, culinary, social work), but they are less profitable and less popular.
We find ourselves at a paradoxical point.
Our career has simultaneously become our primary source of identity, stability, and fulfillment, and our primary source of fragility, anxiety, and uncertainty.
No career is safe, but many professionals can be
In this context, the question isn't "which profession to choose" or "which sector is safe." These are linear questions for a world that's no longer linear.
The real question is: what type of professional can thrive in a chaotic, demanding, continually transforming environment?
My answer: a professional that lives in a state of permanent tension.
It's not the paralyzing tension of chronic stress, but a productive tension: the constant awareness that the context is changing, and that the right response cannot be to resist change but to use it as fuel.
I call this kind of professional the Explorer-Practitioner.
The Explorer-Practitioner:
Understands that they are surrounded by too many changes, driven by many people, groups and institutions, with radically different interests, at a sustained pace. The system is chaotic, always in a state of tension and a "good work plan" is not going to fix it.
Accepts that this tension is messy, but it's plenty of opportunities: it's generative. There are more people, resources, ideas that can be leveraged.
Knows that reaching their goals will require them to continuously explore new ways to think, work and solve problems. If everything is changing so often, no playbook stays relevant for more than a while.
Learns to focus on the desired outcomes without being stubborn about their opinion on how to achieve it. They are always exploring new perspectives while experimenting with new practices. With time, the Explorer-Practitioner learns to adapt faster and better to what the chaos around them throws at them.
The key word here is "generative": the tensions caused by chaos and leveraged by the Explorer-Practitioner aren't an end in themselves. They produce something: new skills, new approaches, new opportunities.
DimensionOld school professionalExplorer-PractitionerLearningFollows structured paths (courses, certifications, degrees). Delegates their own development to institutions.Invests autonomously in their own learning. Reads, observes, experiments. Doesn't wait for someone to tell them what to learn.Career strategyPlans linearly: goal, plan, execution. Believes a good strategy automatically leads to success.Thinks divergently from the start. Knows the plan won't survive contact with reality and prepares mentally and practically for adaptation.Relationship with uncertaintySees uncertainty as a problem to solve. Seeks stability and predictability.Sees uncertainty as information. Uses it to recalibrate direction, priorities, and methods.Professional identityDefined by role, title, sector. "I'm an engineer." "I'm a consultant."Defined by transferable capabilities and attitude. The role is a vehicle, not an identity.Relationship with expertiseAccumulates vertical expertise. The more they know about one subject, the safer they feel.Combines cross-disciplinary skills. Seeks intersections between different fields because that's where the best ideas are born.Reaction to failureExperiences it as a signal of an error in the plan. Corrects the plan and retries the same path.Experiences it as data. Extracts information, modifies the approach, and often changes direction entirely.
Three practices for becoming an Explorer-Practitioner
Most of us figured out a while ago that learning institutions don't prepare us well for the job market. We learned to adapt. That's going to serve us now.
The transition from Old School Professional to Explorer-Practitioner depends on changing your thinking patterns, your professional practice, and what you feed your brain. It's an individual responsibility.
Three skills sit at the core of the Explorer-Practitioner's approach.
1 / The explorative muscle
I spent six years reading almost exclusively about management and strategy. Books, articles, podcasts, all in the same lane. My thinking didn't get better. It got narrower. I kept arriving at the same conclusions using the same frameworks. Not great for someone whose job is solving strategic problems.
Then I started reading about evolutionary biology. About how restaurants price menus. About the history of urban planning. None of it was "useful" in the immediate sense. But something shifted. Problems I'd been stuck on for months started cracking open, because I was finally looking at them from angles that weren't pre-loaded into my professional bubble.
Cognitive science calls this "divergent thinking". It's the ability to generate multiple solutions to an open-ended problem by pulling from different, seemingly unrelated domains. Convergent thinking narrows - divergent thinking widens.
Most professionals are trained almost exclusively in convergent mode: analyze the data, find the answer, execute the plan. But the people who consistently generate unorthodox ideas, the ones who see opportunities before others, are the ones who've built the habit of thinking sideways. You build that habit by exposing yourself to ideas that have nothing to do with your job.
Action items:
Read outside your lane. Not "business books from adjacent sectors." Actually outside.
Books: Take a tour on Goodreads or at your neighborhood bookstore, and search for books that make you curious in aisles you never visit. Examples: Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life is about mushrooms. It will rewire (pun intended, but you'll understand it only after reading the book) how you think about networks, collaboration, and emergent intelligence. How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand (1994) is about architecture, but it's really about how systems and careers adapt over time. It sounds absurd. That's the point.
Make time for newsletters that don't waste your time. Avoid newsletters that belong to commercial firms. A few examples: Packy McCormick's Not Boring (notboring.co) does deep dives into tech, business strategy, culture and emerging industries in a way that makes you think across categories, which is exactly the muscle you're trying to build. Dense Discovery by Kai Brach (densediscovery.com) curates design, technology, and sustainability with taste and substance. Experimental History by Adam Mastroianni writes about science and human behavior with the kind of clarity that makes you rethink things you thought you understood.
Reddit, used properly. You're looking for topics you don't care about but can keep you reading for hours. Examples:
r/slatestarcodex is where people with diverse technical and intellectual backgrounds analyze problems you won't find discussed elsewhere.
r/TrueReddit surfaces long-form writing across disciplines.
And for when you need a reminder that the world is delightfully absurd: r/VXJunkies, a subreddit where people discuss an entirely fictional field of engineering with total seriousness
Commuting, cooking and gym time is for thought-provoking podcasts.
Dialectic by Jackson Dahl (dialectic.fm) is one of the best things happening in podcasts right now. Dahl does long-form conversational portraits of original people across technology, media, business, and creativity.
Minds Almost Meeting (mindsalmostmeeting.com) pairs economist Robin Hanson and philosopher Agnes Callard, two brilliant people from completely different intellectual traditions, and lets them collide.
EconTalk by Russ Roberts covers economics, philosophy, and science with genuine intellectual honesty, including admitting when the host doesn't know or is wrong. Similarly, Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen) is relentlessly cross-disciplinary and never predictable.
Hunt for new tools and methods.
Tech tools: subscribe to Product Hunt and to Openhunt. Review what can you play with without wasting too much time. Measure against your existing stack. AI tools, no-code platforms, new analytics approaches - don't wait for your company to adopt them. Test them yourself, on a small scale.
Follow what's happening in adjacent industries. If you work in consulting, study how game designers run playtests. If you're in marketing, look at how researchers design experiments. If you manage teams, dig into how operating room teams run debriefs. Every field has developed methodologies that work brilliantly in their context and haven't crossed into yours yet. That gap is your opportunity.
(Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the full list of recommendations)
The goal isn't accumulation. You don't need to remember everything.
You need enough diverse inputs that when you face a new problem, your brain has more than one template to reach for.
2 / The reflective muscle
Here's what I've noticed about the people who consistently generate original thinking in their field: they all have some kind of processing practice. They usually reflect on their experience in writing because it forces precision, but some of them just make time to think, alone, at their favorite café.
Reflection is not journaling. It's almost entirely absent from most people's routines, because unlike reading or listening, reflection doesn't feel productive. Proactive reflection is about taking the time to describe and interpret our experiences, and find actionable insights to make better progress. There's one question at its core: what did I actually learn, and does it change anything about how I work?
Action items:
Make an habit of starting or ending your day by writing a structured daily note.
Ask yourself "What did I do lately that felt new, confusing or exciting? What can I learn from it and how will it help me in the future?". The goal is not to write a diary, nor a summary of what you do or read (those practices are great, but they are not reflection).
You can use Evernote (evernote.com) or any similar app. I use Evernote as it's been lately revamped and it went back to world-class. You can use Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Drafts, or simple pen and paper. Do not overthink it.
Talk to people who think differently from you. Actual conversations about ideas. If it feels like small talk, interrupt the conversation and ask an exaggeratedly profound question (e.g., "what's the hardest thing you are trying to achieve and why is it so difficult to do so?").
Technology helps: Lunchclub (lunchclub.com) uses AI to match you with professionals based on your goals and interests, and schedules 1:1 video conversations automatically. You just show up. Shapr (shapr.co) works like a daily feed of potential connections you swipe through based on tagged interests. Both remove the friction that stops most people from ever reaching outside their existing circle.
Set a goal: two conversations per month with someone from a completely different field, where you share what you're working on and they tell you what seems obvious to them that you're missing. You can obviously reach out to people you already know. Make sure the conversation doesn't get stuck at the "and how's your family?" level.
Write publicly, without trying to go viral. A Substack, a LinkedIn post, even a shared doc with colleagues. Not to build an audience (that can be a nice side effect, but it's not the goal). The goal is sharpen your thinking. Writing forces you to articulate what you actually learned, versus what you think you learned. And it invites feedback from people who know things you don't.
(Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the full list of recommendations)
3 / The integrative muscle
Here's where most people stall.
We understood that a chunk of your time has to be invested in exploring new ideas; another one requires you to reflect on what you are learning from those ideas and from your experience. The biggest chunk of your time should focus on finding a way to turn those insights in useful practices.
The Explorer-Practitioner treats their work like a lab. Not in the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" sense, but in the "I have a hypothesis about what might work better, and I'm going to test it this month in a small, controlled way" sense.
Action items:
Learn to make your insights digestible by your colleagues. You will find yourself full of new perspectives, stories and ideas to be tested. Some of these will be hard to understand for the more conformist colleagues. Your job is to figure out what opens doors with your peers. Some people want the "how" before the "why." Others need to see your full reasoning before they'll move. Some light up at creative solutions; others won't budge until they see a risk analysis. Pay attention to what lands. The best idea in the room is worthless if nobody listens.
Define a monthly experiment. Implement with care. It can be trying a different method for an existing deliverable, trying a new technology that can improve your workflows, or exploring a new collaboration with someone outside your usual circle. Document what you tested, what happened, what you'll do next, and be intentional about what is worth keeping and what isn't.
(Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the full list of recommendations)
How does an Explorer-Practitioner know they are on the right path
There's a state that Explorer-Practitioners live in that most people misread as chaos.
It looks messy from the outside. You're reading about fungi and urban planning and behavioral economics while testing a new meeting format and writing about what you learned last week. Your browser tabs are a disaster and your notes app is a labyrinth. People around you might wonder when you're going to "focus."
But what looks like chaos is actually generative tension. It's the dynamic that holds multiple ideas simultaneously, lets them collide, merge and recombine until something new emerges.
Most professionals avoid this state, because they want clarity. There's nothing wrong with that, until the environment changes and their entire toolkit becomes obsolete.
This is where the unfair advantage lives. Because generative tension produces three things that linear, structured, "focused" career development can't.
It produces innovative strategies. A pricing insight from restaurant economics combined with a behavioral nudge from psychology combined with a delivery mechanism borrowed from game design produces something that nobody working inside any one of those fields would have invented. These novel combinations are what companies call innovation and what the market rewards with premium pricing, faster growth, and defensible positioning.
It produces operational excellence. The professional who lives in generative tension is already practiced at performing without a map. When the market shifts, when AI makes part of their job obsolete, when a client throws a curveball, they don't freeze. They have a repertoire of work processes, problem solving tactics and management practices to draw from. This matters more now than at any point in the last fifty years.
Most importantly, it produces career momentum. The Explorer-Practitioner ends up with a wider network, a richer expertise and an experience that is easily adaptable to new contexts. They are a dream candidate and a potentially brilliant founder. When they reach a career junction, they have more paths to choose from, because they've built a richer map.
There is a real return on becoming an Explorer-Practitioner. It's a fundamentally different approach to professional development and executive practice.
In a world that gets more chaotic by the year, it may be the only approach that delivers a career that's both successful and stimulating.
