I’m standing with drink in hand, talking to someone I just met at a party.

He asks me how AI is affecting my business.

I try to look serious and deep, but I can’t help it: A huge smile breaks out on my face.

“AI is the best thing to happen to me since Covid,” I say through the grin.

He looks at me quizzically.

You see, a large part of my professional life is writing stuff for people. AI should be cutting through that like a hot knife through butter. This guy expects me to trot out a “woe is me” story, not to smile and say AI is great for business.

But you see, writing is just words. What matters is what you are saying with them. My job is not to string words together, it’s to coach people on how to be more clear with their point of view, how to articulate it more boldly.

In short, first to find clarity, and then to be courageous in being human.

Where does Covid come into this? It’s this:

For years before 2020, I tried to turn my business 100% remote, so that I could break out of the limits a geographic market was putting on me (I was in Istanbul at the time).

I was completely unsuccessful in that. I made no headway whatsoever. It was like banging my head against a brick wall.

And then in early 2020 Covid shows up, and within a month everything was just expected to be online. I was ready for it, and I’ve been riding that wave for 5 years.

Covid and AI were both supposed to be complete, career-ending disasters. And yet they were a couple of the best things to ever happen to me.

It just depends on what you want to do with disaster, I guess.

As that guy says in the TV show Game Of Thrones, “Chaos isn’t a pit, chaos is a ladder.”