← The Futur with Chris Do
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If you're scared about what AI means for your career, keep watching. AI is moving fast, tools are getting better, and yes, some jobs, sadly will disappear. But if you're a creative professional worried about being replaced, here's what you need to know. In this video, I want to walk you through the six high income skills creative professionals must learn and strengthen. That I believe with full confidence will be more valuable, not less, in the years to come. These aren't just things AI can't do, they they're things AI was never designed to do. Now, before I jump in, I do want to clarify something that's really important. These are not the jobs you should be doing, but the skills you should strengthen, stack and lead with if you want to become IRreplaceable. Skill number one, strategic thinking and problem solving. This is the ability to define problems, ask the right questions and lead creative strategy, especially in branding. And why can't AI do it? AI can give you options, it can even give you a decent answer, but it can't figure out the real problem or lead a client through ambiguity. Strategy is about framing, not just responding. In the last couple of decades, there was a lot of value in the doing what to do, how to do it. But in the age of AI, when anything can be done just by almost anybody with the ability to type, it's less important what and how, but why? This is where you come in the machine. AI can't figure out the why. And this is where you, in conversation with a client cannot be replaced. To think strategically, to think long term. And what you can do with your client is by a series of asking smart strategic questions. You can align and also resolve conflicting ideas. AI can't sit in a client meeting and sense the nuance behind the brief. They can't read the micro expressions. It currently cannot see subtle shifts in body language, which we are naturally wired to pick up. High income. Skill number two, emotional intelligence and empathy. What does this even mean? The ability to read people, sense what's not being said, the subtext if you will. Creating and communicating in a way that feels right, not just looks right. Because as we've already learned, people remember how you made them feel more than the words you've actually said. And here's why. AI won't be able to replace that. AI doesn't feel awkward silences, it doesn't see body language. It doesn't understand why a client hesitated when you said the word rebrand, for example. And when it comes to branding per se, branding is built on emotional connections, not just visuals. Most of our decision making is based on our emotional state. So when we're helping to guide a client to build relationships with the customers in a rebrand, we're trying to understand through experience and intuition what emotion's going to trigger them to take action. This is why AI cannot replace you in this regard, because it lacks the emotional empathy, because it has never lived a life. And what's really important to achieve that is if you can read the room, you can lead the room. And even outside the world of branding, this is such an important skill to have, because when we're talking to people, there are the words that are being spoken, the things they're aware of, and then there are things that they're not aware of and the emotional states in which they live in. And if you can't figure that out, people are not going to trust you. They're not going to feel like you understand them, they're not going to feel seen and heard. And before anybody would do any business with anyone else, they need to first feel that from you. What people oftentimes forget and don't understand about branding is it's an irrational emotional connection to a product or service. We can't really explain it, but we feel a certain connection to a certain brand of shoes, hotels, cars or consumer electronics. We have an emotional attachment to an intangible thing or service, even a faceless entity for which we will feel sad when that entity no longer exists. This is the power of branding, and this is not something that AI yet understands. And this is where the human can play a really important role. It's a difference between having loved and having your heart broken, and reading about a story. When someone has loved someone else and has their heart broken, it's vastly different. Let me try and reframe it this way. Every time you've gone to make a purchasing decision, what informed or influenced your choosing one person or one company over the next? Was it the offerings? Was it the price point? Or was it something else? And at first you might say it was a good deal, it was great service and features. But oftentimes what we don't recognize it was because there was a gut feeling that person made you feel something, and despite it being a little bit more expensive or less feature laden, you decided to pick them. And oftentimes we're making unconscious, biased decisions because of how we feel. For example, if we meet someone and they start speaking about a topic that we care a lot about, if they are a fan of a team that we love, or if they say something that reminds us of where we originally came from, our hometown. It skews us a little bit towards picking them. Now, unless they say something that gives you that little spider sense where I sure I could trust this person, more likely than not, you're using this gut instinct, this intuition to pick. So when you're on the other side and you're selling services and you over index on features and functions and price point, you are possibly missing the entire point. Sorry to interrupt. I want to let you know that I'm starting this community where we're going to help people just like you, experts, authors and coaches, to develop your personal brand. It's called Content Lab. So. So for more information on that, just check out the links in the description. Now back to our show. The next high income skill is original creativity and conceptual ideation. This is the ability to generate big ideas, to take risks, to make conceptual leaps no machine can predict. And here's why AI can't do it. AI is trained on what's already been done. AI is great at pattern recognition, but breakthrough ideas break patterns. It can remix, but it doesn't originate. It won't surprise you with something that feels risky or weird or human. The courage to be wrong is what creates originality. Great creative ideas often start messy. They're illogical, irrational, and based on intuition. It's you connecting all the dots of your previous lived experiences, the things that you're learning in life, the hard fought battles where you've learned something, and being brave enough to see a connection where no one else has seen a connection. This is why it's inherently messy and wasteful. Not a linear path. We often say the shortest distance between two points is a line. But in creativity, it's a hot, jumbled, tangled mess. And that's where we birth the biggest, boldest ideas. So feel confident in your messy process. Feel affirmed that this weird thing that no one else can understand or explain is what makes you unique and highly irreplaceable. In the 20th century, the people who made the most amount of money were convergent thinkers. Left brainers, the people who managed finance, who ran business but didn't have a lot of imagination. But in the 21st century, divergent thinkers, not convergent thinkers, are the ones who are going to rule the world. They're the ones who assume there are multiple solutions to any problem and they're looking for the most ideal outcome. As my friend Brian Collins would say. Designers are futurists. We rehearse possible future outcomes and we pick the most ideal path towards that outcome. The next greatest skill, tastes and creative judgment. It's the ability to discern what's good and what isn't, knowing what works, what's on brand, and what's going to land with people. Let's be honest, AI can give you 50 versions, but it doesn't know which one to pick or why one works better than the other. You see, answers are cheap. Taste isn't. Your job is to curate, to lead, to shape. So knowing this, what do you need to do as a creative professional? This may not be easy for you to hear. You need to study history, the history of photography, of art, of illustration, of architecture. You have to go into the annals of human creativity and learn the vocabulary of what it means to be professional at doing it at the highest level. And within that, you start to see what has withstood the test of time, what are timeless concepts and ideas. And you start to learn the invisible rules that you might have overlooked in the past. Having great taste, having a curatorial eye, is not easy. This is why there's so many ugly things in the world. Your job is to immerse yourself in humanities and do the things that you hated to do. And instead of just creating, since that job is being done by AI, is for you to learn about what's happened before so you can make a better, more informed decision about what's going to happen in the future. So if you don't have great style, if you don't have great taste, are you totally screwed? Are you doubly screwed? Are you screwed? Because AI will take your job and you don't know what's good or bad? So I'm tell you a very personal story here. I grew up in Northern California in the 80s, and I grew up in the Valley, in Silicon Valley. And I. I wasn't exposed to a lot of art and culture. In fact, I think the first time I got an airplane, I was like 16 or 17 years old and my brother had flown me down from San Jose to San Diego. And it was an experience for me. I was like, okay, this is interesting. All that is to say, I'm not a highly cultured person. I have pretty unsophisticated taste. I was uncouth, as some might say. I go to Art center and I see there are these Europeans or people who are a little older or traveled, who've been to Spain, to Italy, to Germany, to the uk And I've never been anywhere except, except for within Northern California. So how does one close that gap? How does one even compete with these people? Who literally grew up in hundreds of years of art, history and culture. What are you supposed to do? Well, you play catch up. You adopt this mindset of becoming infinitely curious about lots of things, and you become a deep diver, become a dolphin. So whatever it is that sparks your interest or curiosity, go as deep as possible. And through this exposure to lots of material content and information, you start to recognize your own pattern. In a way, you combat the pattern recognition machine by becoming your own pattern recognition machine. So what I would do is I would go to the library. You know, there are these places you can go to look at books and magazines for free and sit down and take 25 magazines at a time and literally just scan through it. You remember that scene in the Fifth Element with Lilu, how she was starting to understand human history? She's watching a machine that just flashed thousands of images in front of her and she was processing that. I want you to become like that, where you're consuming lots and lots of things. And here's the good news. When you pick up a magazine on architecture, it's already been curated by someone who understands what good architecture looks like. So you're not just seeing everything. You're seeing the best of the best being published. If you do this for long enough periods, when you start with the year that you're in, 2025, 2026, and just start working backwards, eventually you start to see patterns that repeat themselves over the course of a couple of decades. With that, you'll be armed with a more informed eye. You'll be able to see things that most people can't see. And not just what most people can't see, but what AI can't see. Now for the next high income skill, storytelling and communication skills. The ability to take an idea and make people care about it. This includes writing, speaking, and structuring ideas in a way that moves people. And here's why AI can't do it. AI can generate text, but it doesn't connect. People don't buy the product, they buy the story. It doesn't know your personal story. You need to be able to communicate what you do, or no one will value it. So here's the thing. Your ability to explain your idea is often more valuable than the idea itself. If you can present clearly, you win. Trust faster. Human communication involves tone, timing, humor, and vulnerability. All things machines can't easily replicate. So I'm going to use myself as an example here. Okay. And I want to delineate this through two chapters on my life. The first one, I ran blind. A service production company where we make commercials for advertising agencies and large global brands. How did I compete? How did I stand out? It was my ability to be able to empathize and to discern the unspoken emotional intent in the room, to be able to read it and to be able to understand and connect and make people feel something. You have to understand something. When agencies are putting out their projects for bid, they're looking at the best in the world. They're potentially warding one company hundreds of thousands of dollars to do work. How do they make these decisions? Well, I've learned that if you can ask questions and connect with them on a human level, you can actually beat companies that are bigger, have more experience, and do better work than you. And that really taught me a valuable lesson about how humans make decisions. It's less about the technical capability, but how you address their individual needs and if they feel connected to you. One example I love to share with people is when one of our prospects had asked a very direct question. And the question was this, Chris, do you understand what we do? Have you looked at our site? And in a split second I said no and no. And I think another person would try to BS their way around that. But the reason why I said what I said was it's my truth. I don't want to tell lies. I don't want to begin a relationship by trying to protect, pretend that I'm something that I'm not. My reason for all of this is what can I hope to learn by looking at your website that I'm not going to learn by speaking to you? And this is ultimately one of the decisions that got us this a hundred thousand dollar logo assignment career. Part number two is although I've developed communication skills, the ability to tell stories, if I don't take this to the world, I'm going to stay in that industry for as long as that industry will have me, which it turns out would not be that much longer. So I needed to learn a different skill. This is the skill to tell stories across platforms, to do it to a piece of glass, this lens, this camera, to an audience that will never see me or be able to respond. And also to be able to do it on stage, which is a different skill. To process my own internal anxiety, to let go of the need to impress people and to really to be of service to folks. And you know what, the consistent feedback that I usually get when I do public speaking, despite being stacked against heavy hitters, people who have millions or billions of dollars, people who have written bestselling books and why I'm able to stand out from them is usually they say this one thing. What you say connects with me. And the best compliment I ever got was you change the atmosphere in the room. Because we feel you're so passionate and genuine about what you're trying to say that we can process what you're saying in a totally different way. And that is all about human to human connection. Whether you're doing it on the phone for a prospect or whether you're doing on a stage or across a piece of glass. Oftentimes people say in the comments, I feel like you're speaking to me right now. And despite sometimes spiciness of what you're saying, I just feel like you're being really genuine and I wouldn't have it any other way. Last but not least, high income skill you need to learn is client partnership and, and relationship building. And not to confuse, this is not about empathy and connection. This is something very different. What do I mean? Business still comes down to people working with people. It's not B2C, it's not B2B. It's H to H, human to human. AI can't read the room, it can't manage egos, navigate politics, or build trust across weeks or years. Relationship capital is a moat AI can't cross. Let me put this in the context of a story. There was a client that I worked with over 10 years ago, maybe even 20 years. I haven't sent out any emails or kept in touch. But one day I'm checking my phone and a message comes from a voice from the past. It's my friend Robert. And Robert's like, hey, Chris, is this still your number? I got something I want to talk to you about and I have to tell you, just knowing that Robert sent me a text and asked me this question made my heart smile a little bit. And so as robotic as I am, as analytical as I am, it's really nice to know that the relationships that you built decades ago are still a sign of how you made people feel, even though all that time has passed. What was really wonderful is Robert wound up booking me to run a workshop for his team is when I saw him, it's almost if we collapsed 20 years of not talking to each other into a moment. I gave him a big warm hug. I was really happy to see him just because I knew he was doing well in life and I felt the same from him. So this is something that is not going to be replaced by AI. It's how you make people feel. And it's about them knowing that you genuinely care about their well being even without maintaining relationships over that time. And here's the message for all my introverted creative people who feel most at home locked in a room in front of their screens, clicking away at the work is when you produce work and you only show the work that you do is you're actually creating a barrier for you to connect with people. You are more than the work that you create because sometime in the future you may no longer be doing this. So you cannot define yourself just purely on the things that you make. This is where I encourage you to get out there, to go outside your comfort zone, to tell your stories in the way that you know how to tell them, and to make it go beyond the word. And dare I say it, I shall have a face to face meeting from time to time. Because even if you're awkward and weird, I think as long as you're being genuine, real people can relate to that. AI is here, it's real and it's very, very powerful. But don't forget, it's just a tool. A smart, powerful tool, but just a tool. It won't build trust, it won't set vision, it won't lead clients, it won't speak with soul. That's your job. So don't fear the AI tools. Use them and build the skills that AI can't touch. If you've enjoyed this, I want to remind you about Content Lab, something that I've launched and it's designed to help coaches, content creators and authors just like you create content that consistently cuts through the clutter.