Most People Want Validation, Not Perspective (Why This Matters Now)

I think one of the biggest gaps we consistently see is how we coach and train ourselves to be better in our careers over time. I think the people who are really excellent at that often don't share what they're learning and they often have processes that make sense to them but not anybody else. It's not a taught thing that we would all get better at our careers and there's certain skills and processes that everybody would practice that would get all of us to level up. Instead, it's

been this sort of secret process that can change. That doesn't have to be the way things are. And AI is wonderful at scaling personalization. And it makes it possible for you to take a personal experience, something that you are struggling with, something that doesn't make sense, and actually get really neat perspective from AI. I call this an AI board of directors. And I think it's a really really good concept for all of us to keep in mind as we look at how we can

level up our careers particularly in the age of AI. So what does this actually look like? Well, let's go back to what a board of directors is. Every public company is required by law to have a board. This isn't optional. It's not just for show. We have decided collectively after enough disasters and enough fraud and enough well-intentioned executives driving their companies off the cliff that leaders cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Instead, it doesn't matter how smart you are. You

have to have a structure that enables other people to ask you uncomfortable questions as a leader, to pressure test your decisions, to notice when you are drifting, to notice when you're rationalizing, to notice when you're optimizing for the wrong things. And so, as a part of that process, we require quarterly reports. We require audits. We've built entire systems essentially of external accountability because we have centuries of evidence that shows that really smart, well-meaning people

can make really bad decisions when nobody is watching. And I guess what I'm saying is nobody is watching your career except for you. And for a long time, unless you've had that awkward conversation with your manager every now and then or you have a self-help book or maybe you go to a seminar on something, it's really difficult to get scaled up, personalized, coached board of directors type accountability over your own career. Like it just we haven't had the tech to do it. It's certainly been too

expensive for people to do it. The people who can afford it tend to be Silicon Valley executives who will pay uh a ridiculous amount of money to an executive coach to help them with something. But beyond that, we really haven't been able to scale this concept to individuals, even though we've asked more and more and more of our individual careers. When the corporation was formed, the idea of an individual career wasn't really a thing. You had the job you had. You grabbed the job you could

grab. Nobody gave you quarterly reviews. Now we have a lot more structure around how we manage people. We have expectations of career progression, but accountability and how we level up ourselves has not really kept up. And so this is the thing that determines your income. This is the thing that determines your options, your autonomy, the texture of your daily life. And the thing you will spend more time on than almost anything else across your decades of adulthood. And yet we have no

grab. Nobody gave you quarterly reviews. Now we have a lot more structure around how we manage people. We have expectations of career progression, but accountability and how we level up ourselves has not really kept up. And so this is the thing that determines your income. This is the thing that determines your options, your autonomy, the texture of your daily life. And the thing you will spend more time on than almost anything else across your decades of adulthood. And yet we have no

governance structure for it. We have no board for that. We have no accountability for that. We have nothing that helps you to know when you're drifting. Nothing that helps you to know when you're lying to yourself. Nothing that helps you to know when you're trading long-term benefits for short-term comfort on the couch with Netflix. Look, I I love football actually. So, for me, it's the football. But you get the idea. You have to figure all of that out for yourself. Maybe you

have a mentor at best, but probably you are just trying to figure out how to get a glimpse into your own performance from the feedback others give you, by the way, on the side. maybe from some praise your manager gives you when they give you your annual review and you get incomplete information and you go back to your daily life and it's difficult to establish a rhythm and it's difficult to follow up. This isn't really an accountability structure. It's really

not something that can help you to get where you want to go. I think that doesn't have to be that way with AI. I think we are underelling AI's potential to give us that kind of structured accountability for our individual careers. But let's face it, before we get to the structure and the accountability, we have to confront ourselves. We are unreliable narrators of our own careers. All of us are. That that includes me. It's not a character flaw. It's not necessarily a sign of

weakness. It's how human cognition works. We construct stories about ourselves that tend to protect our own egos, that justify the choices that we've made, and that let us avoid looking directly at the things we're afraid of. That's as deep as evolution itself. in many ways why we invented language. And so we round up our successes. We round down our failures. We remember the times we were right. We forget the times we were wrong. And we tell ourselves we're being strategic

weakness. It's how human cognition works. We construct stories about ourselves that tend to protect our own egos, that justify the choices that we've made, and that let us avoid looking directly at the things we're afraid of. That's as deep as evolution itself. in many ways why we invented language. And so we round up our successes. We round down our failures. We remember the times we were right. We forget the times we were wrong. And we tell ourselves we're being strategic

when we were just being avoidant. We tell ourselves we're being patient when we're just being passive. We tell ourselves we'll do the hard thing next quarter. This is not really a problem that you can listen to me talking about and think your way out of and and give yourself good intentions and just go along. The machinery of selfdeception operates below our conscious awareness. And you need something new. You need something different. And this is where I want to learn from people who do

navigate their careers well. The ones who make real progress over years and years and years. They almost always have some version of external accountability, formal or informal, that helps them mark to market. Many of them talk about a coach. They talk about a spouse that holds them to a very high bar. Some of them use a structure like a visible chart or a visible journaling system that keeps them accountable. But whatever it is, what I notice is a consistent pattern is they have an

external scaffold that holds them in check. I think we can change how we do that and increase the quality and granularity of the feedback we give ourselves by using AI both as a board of directors and to help us to construct honest looks at ourselves, honest quarterly reports for our board. And I want to be careful here because I'm not trying to make the claim that AI is as good as an incredible human coach. But I do want to say that AI is going to be better than nothing. And AI is better

than what most of us do. And it changes the calculus, right? An AI, if you properly prompt it, isn't necessarily going to try and cuddle your feelings. It's going to give you its honest best assessment because that's what you're asking it to do. And so a lot of the key to getting great accountable feedback is being willing to construct and use really effective prompts that push the LL to nudge you toward your best self. The other thing I will observe it's not just a function of the prompt you

create. It's also a function of the way AI human social dynamics work with a human coach. You may be tempted to impress the human coach. We don't seem to be tempted to impress AI in the same way. Honesty on our side becomes possible in a way that maybe it wouldn't be with a human relationship. Availability is another advantage AI has. You can always talk to your AI about how you're doing. Obviously, that's not always true with a human coach. The point here, though, is not

create. It's also a function of the way AI human social dynamics work with a human coach. You may be tempted to impress the human coach. We don't seem to be tempted to impress AI in the same way. Honesty on our side becomes possible in a way that maybe it wouldn't be with a human relationship. Availability is another advantage AI has. You can always talk to your AI about how you're doing. Obviously, that's not always true with a human coach. The point here, though, is not

the magic words for AI. It's not the magic prompt. The point is leveraging the underlying capabilities of LLMs that I'm describing to develop a structure that's useful. Now if you just open your AI open claude open chat GPT and you say help me think about my career you will get some advice but the world is drowning in career advice and help books and you're unlikely to get something that's differentiated. What we're missing is the detail of what you can share about your career and the

accountability over time that you can develop if you have these conversations intentionally. And so what I built is really a system of prompts that gets you there. And so the idea is it's very simple, right? And I'm going to give you the concept. So if you don't want the prompts, that's fine. If you want my prompts, great. The idea is you start with a quarterly report for yourself. And the quarterly report every 3 months will challenge you to sit down with a prompt that interviews you about what

actually happened in your career in a very detailed manner. Not the highlight reel, not your LinkedIn hype uh version, the real version. What did you say you were going to commit to at the beginning of the quarter? Did you actually get it done? What's the gap? What decisions did you make? And what did you optimize for? And what did you avoid? What are you telling yourself is fine that might not be fine? The interview is going to be uncomfortable. It's supposed to be. It

asks the questions that maybe you've been avoiding. It doesn't let you get away with fake answers. It's trained to the the prompt I wrote is trained to push you. And it in the end produces a document, a a personal board report that you can then bring to a conversation with your AI board. And that document is designed to invite uh scrutiny. It's not designed to invite applause. It's not designed to give you five stars on your next promotion review. Instead, it's designed to give your AI board the

ammunition that they need to push you, to ask the hard questions, to notice the patterns that maybe you've been ignoring. And so I want you to notice that we are putting in place a structure of partnership with AI that enables us to level up reliably as we move into 2026. And so the quarterly report is sort of piece one. And you can hear what I'm saying here. And you can actually construct your own prompt if you don't want to use mine. The central idea is to ask the LLM to interview you and push

you so that you are honest about what your initial assumptions were for this quarter. what actually happened and why you made the choices you made and then where you ended up and then you have to get it all into a report. The second key piece is what I would call instantiating a board of directors and actually having a board conversation. So, there's a little magic here, but it's not too hard. You have to write a metap prompt. And I've put one together for you over

on the Substack. But what you do is you construct a prompt that will interview you about your goals for your career as a whole, your background so far, and where you think your strengths and weaknesses are, what your achievements and failures have been to date. And then the output of that conversation is actually going to be a set of director cards that the LLM can then use to instantiate a board of director. And by director cards, I I literally mean like a character card that the LLM can play.

Because what you're going to get in these conversations is you're going to get questions from different points of view. One of the things that I think is undertalked about is the ability of an LLM in the same conversation to reflect multiple points of view reliably. Andre Carpathy talked about this is the LLM being able to instantiate itself across multiple different roles. And I think that's really interesting. So following that thread, you can go through this

prompt. you can get yourself a board of directors and then what you will get as an output is basically a initial prompt starter for a new conversation and the initial prompt starter will have like five to seven character cards really detailed background so that the LLM knows who these different characters it will play are what their job is as far as pressing you and then you're going to have a conversation you're going to put that prompt in and you're going to start

prompt. you can get yourself a board of directors and then what you will get as an output is basically a initial prompt starter for a new conversation and the initial prompt starter will have like five to seven character cards really detailed background so that the LLM knows who these different characters it will play are what their job is as far as pressing you and then you're going to have a conversation you're going to put that prompt in and you're going to start

to talk about your performance you're going to start to share this quarterly report you developed separately You're going to have a conversation and your board's job is to push you. Your board's job is to press you. They're they're there to ask hard questions about your career development. And at the end of it, what you should get is an overarching perspective on where you're at, what your performance is like this quarter, weaknesses you need to address, and concrete action plans that you can

take to level up and get better in the subsequent quarter. This is way too involved to do every day. I'm not suggesting you do it every day or even every week, but I do think a regular touch point is needed. And I think that artificial intelligence is really well positioned to provide us this touch point. We don't have the same hang-ups we have talking to other people. We don't need to impress them. We do not have the same ability to field multiple perspectives from human plausible

characters that LLMs have because LLMs have read everything. They're able to assume different personas really effectively and therefore able to critique us from really different perspectives within the same session. No human is really going to do that. Now again, for a really sharp human perspective, you're going to have to go to a human. I'm not saying that the AI is perfect, but if you want to grab a board of directors and not procrastinate and level up your career, this has just

not been possible before. We've never been able to scale this out. Literally, every professional on the planet can have their own quarterly report and their own personal board of directors and take their professional development as seriously as you would take a quarterly report to a board if you were running a company. And that is brand new. And that is an example of the kind of unexpected impact that AI can have. Like I guarantee you when we build these AIs like the the model makers did not

design this with this personal development use case. This is just me connecting the dots and saying I think that there's a capability that the AI has that's corresponding to a huge need that we've never been able to address in our own personal development. Let's put them together and let's see what we can come up with. There's going to be dozens more use cases like this, but I think for today, if you can get a quarterly report out, if you can get your board of

directors going, you're going to be set up for 2026. Well, good luck.