Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog. We’re going to talk about some serious stuff this week, but hopefully with a sprinkling of humour.
In our modern world, everything seems designed to remove discomfort. We want answers instantly, parcels tomorrow, food delivered to the door and technology that makes life easier.
But somewhere along the way, we’ve started expecting emotional life to come with the same convenience.
Why have an awkward conversation when you can send a message? Why pick up the phone when an email will do? And why struggle to find the right words when AI can write something beautifully articulate, emotionally intelligent and completely devoid of the uncomfortable bit?
The problem is, some things in life are supposed to be uncomfortable
When I look back over the moments that shaped my life, every one of them began with discomfort. Let me share some examples, and you can decide for yourself: are we becoming a society that’s increasingly uncomfortable with discomfort, and is it costing us opportunities to grow?
Most readers will know I worked in the City of London from the late 80s through to 2021. It was a time when technology was constantly changing, and every promotion meant stepping into a role where you didn’t yet have all the answers.
Difficult conversations were a big part of my job. Restructuring often led to redundancies, and making decisions with incomplete information was a daily occurrence.
In today’s world, the human touch is disappearing. AI drafts the message when we should be having a face-to-face conversation. Messaging apps mean we avoid picking up the phone. And finding an answer to almost any question now takes minutes, so making decisions with incomplete information feels like a thing of the past.
Imagine standing before a company board to defend decisions you’d made and explain missed sales targets — without asking AI to hand you the perfect answer before you walked into the room. That was simply how it was done.
My experience taught me that confidence isn’t the absence of fear; it’s acting despite it. And I think we’re in danger of losing that confidence and costing ourselves opportunities to grow along with it. Because when AI eases difficult decision-making, it also removes the hard experiences that build expertise, judgement, and, more importantly, resilience.
My concern isn’t that younger generations are inherently less resilient. It’s that they may have fewer opportunities to develop resilience in the way previous generations did
In my view, there are four growth opportunities we’re at risk of losing.
First, the early struggles that build resilience. When I started my career, career ladders relied on juniors doing the grunt work. For me, that was an important learning curve; skill-building through the struggle of adapting to a working environment.
AI now handles the bulk of that early-career work, and we’re skipping the first phase that helps people start building resilience.
Second, independent judgement and critical thinking. I often had to work with ambiguous data and incomplete information. As a sales director, when my company was being acquired by a large corporate, I found myself heavily involved in their due diligence process. If I’d failed to convince them our sales department was top-notch, the deal would have fallen through, leaving a lot of disappointed shareholders.
How much easier would that be today? AI could hand you the perfect presentation with perfect answers to every question. But imagine how much less thinking that would have required of me, and how much less I would have grown because of it.
Third, the ability to learn from consequence. Difficult decisions produce visible consequences. Wrong hires, poorly drafted contracts, flawed reviews. I could go on. AI has smoothed over so much of this process that I wonder how we can still learn from our mistakes?
Fourth, the graft of teaching yourself something new. When I first arrived in the City, I had to learn about the financial markets quickly. I read books every spare minute, attended challenging training courses, and made sure I learned from my colleagues whenever I had the opportunity. My brain was active and on fire.
Out of curiosity, before writing this blog, I asked AI how it could help me understand the financial markets. It gave me an excellent summary, and I could’ve delved even further, but where would have been the fun in that?
The graft mattered because I had to work things out, make connections, get things wrong and then try again. And because I had put the effort in myself, I understood it differently, and I remembered more. I developed the mental stamina to tackle something I didn’t understand and keep going until I did.
AI has the potential to be an amazing teacher, but it’s important to find the right balance. There’s a fine line between using it as a helpful tool to support your thinking and relying on it so much that you stop thinking for yourself. In my view, that’s the part we should be mindful of. The kind of growth that might be at risk isn’t just about faster results or more productivity. It’s about losing the chance to develop deep expertise, good judgment, and true resilience over time.
I’m not suggesting we make life harder than it needs to be. Innovation is wonderful, and AI will undoubtedly make many aspects of our lives better. But perhaps we should be careful not to remove every challenge simply because we can.
Growth has always lived just beyond our comfort zone.
Every meaningful chapter of my life, from leading technology teams to living with ankylosing spondylitis to walking the Cornish Coast Path, began with uncertainty, effort or discomfort.
None of those experiences would have been easier if someone had simply handed me the answer. And perhaps that is the point.
AI risks making us less resilient not because it is bad for us, but because it is so good at making difficult things easier. It can remove the very experiences that used to force us to get stronger, think harder and learn how to cope when things don’t go to plan.
So if I can leave you with one tip, perhaps it is this:
Do the hard thing yourself first.
Write the difficult email. Have the awkward conversation. Sit with uncertainty for a while before asking AI to resolve it. Try to work something out before asking it to give you the answer.
Because sometimes the struggle is the learning.
Your friends, your family and your colleagues may thank you for holding on to some of those uncomfortable human things, but more importantly, you may thank yourself when life inevitably throws something at you that AI can’t fix.
And that leaves me with one final question.
If resilience requires time, patience, mistakes and a little bit of struggle, will life give us the time to develop it?
And perhaps more importantly…
Will employers?