’Don’t let AI set your vision. But harness AI to help you execute your vision.’
For me, the start of a new year always brings a sense of potential. It’s a chance to make changes. But I’m old enough to know that resolutions are easy to make and hard to keep – these days I’m all about design rather than decisions.
This year, more than any other I can remember, feels like a tipping point in history as AI goes mainstream and the polycrisis comprising climate, economic and geopolitical unrest swirls around us.
What does it mean to be a slightly better human in this context? It’ll be different for everyone, but it’s almost certain to involve some intentional choices about our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions. And it will also demand that we think carefully about what we delegate to AI to boost our productivity and effectiveness and what we retain as a core human capability.
Here are some thoughts on how I’m approaching this new year, and some questions for you to think about, too. And however you decide to design 2025, there’s some thoughts on how you can use exploratory writing as your secret weapon for making those changes stick.
Let’s make this New Year extraordinary!
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Hello, and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club. I’m Alison Jones, and this is, well, this is lots of things, actually. It’s episode 437, it’s the first episode of 2025, it’s the first episode after the Christmas/Twixtmas break, and it’s a new year special. And that is a lot to load on to an episode. But, you know, I think this one can take it. So, first of all, let me wish you a very happy new year. You can say that up to an, including the 14th of January, by the way, two weeks in, if you’re wondering. That’s the rule. After that it’s not new anymore, get on with it.
But right now, as I speak on the 4th of January, and when this goes out on the 6th of January, 2025, it is brand new and it’s full of promise and potential. And I don’t care how old and jaded you are, I have seen a lot of new years, There is still something hopeful and exciting about a fresh new page.
But when I came to think about this episode, I didn’t just want to talk about the whole new year resolutions, new year, new you malarkey. Do you know, I, I’ve done quite a few new year, extraordinary business book club podcast episodes that do exactly that and, and they’re, they’re great. They’ve aged well, do take a listen. This time I wanted to give you half an hour of brain food that that tapped into the new year energy and which you could go back and listen to any new year in the future, but also one that spoke to where we are right now, at the start of January, 2025, at a tipping point in history, facing the, the poly crisis that includes the accelerating climate emergency, the mainstream adoption and exponential growth of AI in every area of our lives, global geopolitical instability, war, cost of living crisis, near collapse of the national health service, if you’re in the UK… I’m sure I missed lots, but you get the picture. There is a hopefulness about new year, and it’s also undeniable that we are living in challenging times.
And you know, most of this is above my pay grade, frankly.
I am a business book publisher and a podcast host, and that gives me relatively little purchase in the international political arena. I’m guessing you’re in a similar position. But it doesn’t mean that we are powerless, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t help ourselves and other people do life better.
So that’s what I want to grapple with in this episode: what is the most effective way for me personally, for you personally to go into this new year, with all of this swirling around us?
I was watching a program on TV the other day about a Victorian naturalist and her sketchbooks, with these beautiful hand drawn, hand colored representations of the firms and the flowers that she was studying.
Now she had obviously taken an intentional decision to create those. But having done that, she didn’t really have to think about how she was going to do it. Like, all she had available to her was paper, pencils, paint, and her own skill.
Just a few decades later, she could have used a camera to take photographs of them. Today she could use her phone not just to snap a picture, but to get all the world’s available information about them immediately.
So here’s what I was wondering. Would she still have created those beautiful drawings if she hadn’t had to?
Or would she have used the new tools to create something completely different that hasn’t even been thought of yet?
We haven’t really had to think about being human before, because there wasn’t an alternative. But now nearly everything that needs doing can be done by AI. And that means that we need to be ruthlessly intentional about what we do for ourselves and what we delegate to AI. So here’s the question for you for 2025: how will you harness AI? Because you will be using it even if you don’t plan to, and if you’re in business, you must use it because your business will fall irretrievably behind without it. And what will you retain and develop as your human capability?
So first of all, and without being facetious, What do I actually mean when I say human? For the purposes of this podcast, I think, honestly, for the purposes of being able to function in the world without going nuts overthinking things, there are, say, four dimensions to each of us as humans: body, mind, heart and soul. If you prefer: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. They’re all in the mix. And if we’re going to operate at our best as humans they all need some attention.
And I think new year is a great time to think about how you can make some changes to make each of those dimensions work a little bit better. And that gains new significance when we’re having to rethink what we want to keep for ourselves as humans and what we want to delegate to AI, which can obviously do so much so much better than we can.
I don’t really think in terms of resolutions anymore at new year because I’ve got too much experience of them. I am really bad at making good decisions consistently. I am willing to bet you are too, because this is also part of being human.
Now I think in terms of life design, so that I minimize the number of decisions that I have to take, because I know that if I have to take a decision about what’s easy in the short term or what’s good for me in the long term, between those two, short-term me is going to smash it hands down every time, and especially if I am feeling tired or down or hangry, or it’s a month with a Y in it. You get the idea.
So let’s look at each of those human dimensions in turn thinking about how we can make tweaks that mean that we rely less on having to make decisions each time and more on having designed our life in the way that we want it to go. And we’re going to start with the one that has the smallest crossover, if you like, with artificial intelligence, the physical. How’s your body doing? How are you doing by your body? And this is foundational. This is… your body is your home. There is no plan B. If you’re in a mess physically, Then that is going to impact the mental, the emotional and to a lesser extent the spiritual stuff too.
Luckily this one I think is the simplest to get right, although being simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy. Move more, eat better, stretch, hydrate, floss, wear sunscreen. You know what works for you, now how do you design it in so that you are pre-committed, so you don’t have to take a decision? Because as we have established, humans are really bad at making good decisions consistently.
And you know, I don’t know what this looks like for you, but for me, It’s about keeping up my running streak. Which is now. Into its seventh year, it’s incredible. Isn’t it? It’s about being booked in for strength sessions in the gym three mornings a week. And not right now this minute, but once all the Christmas food is finished, it’s about buddying up with a friend on My Fitness Pal. It’s cutting back on the carbs and the processed food again. I’ve set a slightly higher target this year for my running, I’m planning to do longer runs more regularly, but otherwise, It’s just keeping on with what I know works for me. So what tweaks do you need to make? Start small. Make it easy to succeed. Build on that.
And then there’s the mind.
And I think this is where AI poses simultaneously the greatest threat and also the greatest opportunity. And as you can imagine, as a publisher, I’ve got quite strong views on this. I am very aware of the massive issues with accuracy and copyright infringement that using AI for writing involves, to say nothing of its its awful, derivative quality. But aside from all that, I believe that writing, and especially exploratory writing, the kind of writing that you do for yourself rather than the people, the kind of writing where you don’t quite know what it is you’re trying to say, I believe that that is quite simply the best way to think. More on this in a minute.
But for now, here’s the question: how do you want your mind to grow this year? I’m in the process of converting our tiny junk room sort of behind the stairs into a reading room. and I’ve got myself, a reading journal this year.
I have just started the research into my next book. Which is such an exciting, curious, growth-oriented phase to be in. It’s also really fun, it’s before the real work starts. So, yeah, I plan to really enjoy it, but also I have got my systems in place, this is experience speaking, for, for catching, recording, the material that I’m going to use when it comes to the actual writing.
So feel free to grab me briskly by the lapels if you see me in the next few months and demand an update from me. I know I would say this, but I think that writing a book is quite simply the single best professional and personal self-development project you can undertake. So, if you want more of that in your life this year, You know where I am. And if you’ve not signed up to the 10 day business book proposal challenge yet there are five spaces left for the challenge that begins next week, 13th of January. Get yourself over to proposal challenge.com. Get onto it. Pronto.
And thirdly, heart, your emotional self.
This is the one that I feel least qualified to speak about if I’m honest, because I don’t know what you’re facing or how you’re feeling right now. And, and I’m in a pretty good place, actually, grateful for it. So that might be very unhelpful. I don’t know. I’m sorry. All I’m going to say is that I have realized I need to make more time for real world time with local friends, alongside of course family relationships, but also my wonderful author community and the rich online conversations that I have every day. And what made me realize this specifically? It was that I spent a day last week doing craft projects with some local mums.
Very low key. Very informal. Very spontaneous. Just all our teenagers were hanging out together, we just had a ball. It was glorious. We drank all the tea. We had all the chat. I didn’t look at my phone or check my emails once. I came back, with a gonk, feeling like it had a spa day or something, except even better because my gonk. And also I’d done some pyrography, which is incredibly satisfying if you’ve never tried it. So I want more afternoons like that in 2025, please.
We’ve already put the next one in the diary, pre-committed, see, not requiring a decision in the moment from me, because if I left it to decide on the day, I might just choose to hole up with my laptop instead and catch up on some work. It’s interesting. I said to one of the women afterwards. You know, I was so caught up in the task and the moment that I didn’t have any awareness of just how happy I was. Do you think, is that better than coming out at the moment to recognize your own happiness or is it better to just stay in the moment? And she looked at me and she said, Wow, that is next level overthinking. Alison. Which made me laugh. So yeah, there you are.
What about you? Do you need to work on building more restorative enriching connections in 2025, taking more time to have fun with people that you like? Or do you need something else? Again, only, you know, But to be human means to acknowledge that you have an emotional dimension, that while your emotions don’t define you, and that they pass, like the weather, they do matter. And, and you know, it isn’t about being happy all the time.
Obviously that would be very one dimensional. But there are things that you can do to improve the overall climate. And most of the things that help, spoiler alert, involve sharing real time and space with real humans without your phone in your hand. And if you can be outdoors in nature so much better.
And then finally. Spiritual. A bit controversial this one, as I know, many listeners won’t even acknowledge that they have a spiritual dimension, others will have their own views about what it means to them to honor their spiritual dimension. So, all I can do is speak to myself. For me as a Christian, it is actually the most fundamental parts of my life’s work, all the other dimensions
are second to this one, and yet I am incredibly bad at k eeping my attention and my focus there when there’s so much going on so much to be done. So much shiny stuff and distractions and all that kind of, I mean, some of it’s good, but, but it all takes me away from that. So my goals here are, as they always are every year, to start each day with a quiet time, reading the Bible and praying, and that has got to be at the start of the day otherwise I, it never, it doesn’t get done at all.
And I think there’s a more general point here. This has, as I say, been my regular new year intention for more years than I care to remember. And I keep messing it up, but that is not a reason not to recommit. And I heard a very helpful phrase at church this week, which I’m going to share with you. I hope it helps you too.
‘We are called to faithfulness, not success.’ I find that very, very comforting, very liberating. I hope you do too.
Right. I promised that I would say a bit more about exploratory writing in the context of all of this. And so here it is. Whatever it is that you decide to change about your life this year, whatever situation you’re facing. I’ve regular exploratory writing practice can massively increase your chances of getting a better outcome. You can basically become on the page, your own therapist-cum-coach-cum-sensemaker. Reflecting on what went well and what didn’t and what lessons you can take from that, noticing the emotions and complexities around situations and naming them and understanding them better, and also allowing yourself to articulate and interrogate your goals, to make them smarter and more real and therefore more likely to come to fruition. And here’s an abridged version of something that I wrote in my book ‘Exploratory Writing: Everyday magic for life and work’ about this.
‘I believe there are three interconnected foundational principles that underpin the magic of exploratory writing: agency, intention and attention. Like all psychological and philosophical terms they are the subject of vigorous debate. But for the purposes of this book, I will define them like this:
Agency equals capacity for making things happen for impacting the world.
Intention. Equals deliberately choosing what out of the million different things you could make happen today or in your lifetime. You are going to attempt.
Attention equals focusing your mind and energy on your chosen priority in a consistent and persistent way in order to make those intended things happen.
These principles are inextricably interdependent.
If we believe we have agency, we can bring our intention to deciding what it is we’re going to attempt. This means we’re more likely to achieve it through sustained attention over however many weeks, months, maybe even years it takes. If we don’t believe in our own agency we’ll never even try to achieve anything significant. If we don’t bring intention to the task of choosing we will drift through life. And if we can’t marshal our attention to the task that we’ve chosen we won’t see it through.
When the three work together, they create a virtuous circle. As we see results from focusing our attention on the goals we’ve chosen to pursue our sense of our own agency increases.
I call these principles foundational because without them it’s impossible for us to achieve anything of real value. Let’s look at each of them in turn to see how expiratory writing can help.
Agency.
So much of what happens to us day by day is outside our control, from other people’s behavior to the weather, to a cost of living crisis. Even if we’re not in the grip of truly disempowering circumstances, such as illness, poverty, abuse, or discrimination, most of us spend much of our time feeling more or less powerless, which is a soul sucking sort of a state. Exploratory writing allows us to transform the page into a small and yet infinite space where we can have complete control. We’re not answerable to anyone else, we’re not constrained by any reality, unless we choose to be, we can follow any thought that takes our fancy and imagine any state we choose. You might not feel able to stand up in front of a room full of people and give a presentation right now, but you can write about doing it. And by authoring that experience, you can visualize it in much the same way that an athlete might visualize crossing the finishing line in an Olympic final.
Visualization has been used by sports coaches for decades now. When an athlete mentally rehearses the outcome they want., It triggers brain activity similar to the experience itself. The visualization creates a new neural pathway, which primes the athlete to act in a way consistent with that outcome, thereby making it more likely that they will achieve their goal.
You may not be planning to use this mental magic to win an international sporting event any time soon, I know I’m not, but there’s no rule against using it in other areas of your life. Exploring on the page what it would be like to nail that presentation, get that promotion, launch that podcast, whatever it is that you want to achieve, and which seems out of your grasp can help it feel more possible. And that sense of agency quickly translates into your attitude and behavior, which can’t help but lead to better outcomes.
Intention.
Having established your agency, your capacity to take meaningful action, the obvious question becomes, what action will you take? And since, as hockey star Wayne Gretzky famously pointed out, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, the act of choosing the shots that you will take is of central importance in determining your final outcomes.
Setting an intention requires some conscious thought and it also demands some courage. It is after all much easier not to take the shot as then there’s no possibility of failing, with all the embarrassment and uncomfortable sensations that involves. By not setting an intention you get to sit in the stands with everyone else watching the game. This is a far more comfortable place to be. No risk of injury or failure, and you can munch snacks as you criticize the players for their misses.
To complicate matters, the number of options between which we have to choose has never been greater. So much choice can be paralyzing. If you can be anything, go anywhere, do anything, how do you decide? What if you get it wrong? Relentless social media scrutiny means that failure is more public than ever. All in all deciding to set your intentions is a risky business. The only thing worse than doing it, in fact, is not doing it. Once again, exploratory writing provides a safe space in which to formulate and test your intentions. You can use the page as a time machine. What might things look like in five years time if you take this action? And what if you don’t? Or you can run a line down the middle and create a pros and cons argument that helps you set out and evaluate the debate going on in your head. Even just seeing a possible course of action set out on paper, having gone through the process of articulating it, it can give you a sense that it is achievable.
Attention.
If intention is choosing to take a particular shot, attention is the focus we bring to it both in the moment and in the weeks, months and years of training involved in achieving it. And we appear to be in the middle of an attention crisis.
So often what we intend to achieve on any given day is hijacked by others’ demands. And if we’re honest, sometimes we’re even grateful. Stevie Smith sat at her desk, longing for the person from Porlock, the person who infamously interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge as he feverishly transcribed his drug fueled vision to create Kubla Khan. I am’ hungry to be interrupted,’ she admitted. And aren’t we all sometimes? It gets us off the hook. If no distraction comes along, then we have no excuse not to finish that poem, write that report, find that solution. Maybe that’s why we’re so addicted to checking our phones. We too long for the person from Porlock. And if they aren’t going to oblige us by showing up at the door we’ll go looking for them on TikTok. But I’ve discovered that even those who like me are suckers for distraction and having an abysmal attention span for purely mental work can sustain a focused writing sprint for six minutes.
There are two related reasons for this:
number one: it’s offline. Time spent doing exploratory writing with a pen and paper is effectively time off grid. Nobody can interrupt us remotely, no app can make its bid for our attention. We can’t flick to Google to find the answer to a question and then lose an hour to breaking news or, let’s face it, cat videos. Just as importantly, nobody can track our keystrokes or access a shared document. We can say whatever we like, free from digital spice. If that feels subversive it’s because it is.
And number two: it anchors our focus. Inside our heads thoughts tend to circle endlessly. And as we can only hold one in front of us at any one time, it’s hard to keep our attention on an idea long enough to develop it in any significant way even at the best of times. And when we do have an insight, any distraction, that incoming message alert, for example, can make it evaporate in a second.
Thinking onto paper allows us to unspool our thinking and hold onto the thread, rewind if we need to come back to the point. Whereas thinking often feels like going round in circles, writing gives us a sense of moving forward.
These might sound like esoteric principles, but a daily exploratory writing practice allows us to embed them in the day-to-day stuff of life. Just for a few minutes each day, it allows us to connect with a sense of our own agency, to practice intention, and to bring our attention to that in a way that quite simply helps us get more of the stuff that matters done.’
Do you know, I do feel like I need to do a new edition of exploratory writing specifically aimed at positioning it as the tool most useful for harnessing human intelligence at work and home in a world of AI.
But for now, Those principles will do nicely.
So that’s it. Don’t let AI set your vision, but harness AI to help you execute your vision. If you’re writing, use it for research and improving readability. It’s brilliant at that. But don’t let it think and write for you. It’s rubbish at that.
I didn’t use AI at all in the conception and writing of this podcast episode, other than the auto-correct that Word does to my flaky touch typing. Because writing stuff like this is a great use of my human brain and my human impulse to connect with other humans. I did use AI in the shape of Descript to transcribe the audio file because that’s a great use of AI, even though you have to go through very carefully and correct it. AI could have written something like this in seconds. But if I let AI do this, then that wouldn’t have moved me forward and it wouldn’t connect with you on a human level. Like I want to connect with you, human to human. Sometimes it’s not about the output. It’s about the outcome.
So that’s it for me for this week. I hope that’s been useful, that it’s provoked some useful thoughts and ideas for you. That you are going to take action on something that matters to you, body mind, heart or soul, or a combination of any or all of those things.
And I hope that you feel more hopeful about what it means to be human in this coming year, less afraid of exploring and using AI tools to help you get stuff done at the operational level and more confident about not letting AI take over the executive level.
Happy new year. I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting one, but I pray that it’s also one in which you move closer to becoming the human you want to be.
