Mashrur Hossain (GitHub)

So last year I spoke about unlocking personal growth with the help of Gen AI. This year I'm talking about career productivity and growth, and career success.

The first thing, then, we have to define is: what is career success or growth? Is it happiness at work? Is it purpose or meaning in what we do? Or a hundred other positive things we can say?

Well, raise your hand if you found yourself in the zone in the last week and you just lost track of time. Yeah, many of you, right? How did that feel? That felt like success, right? So a lot of people call that flow state. So in a way, getting to flow state and staying in flow state, and getting there as many times as we can while we work, can lead to success and happiness at work. At least that's what I feel.

So a few years ago I saw this TED talk by Dandapani, and it was about how to focus — it's called unwavering focus, how to concentrate, and essentially how to get to the flow state more often, because you are able to concentrate. And what he said was: do one thing at a time. Do one thing at a time, focus on one thing at a time.

There are other books and resources out there. This is a great one: Atomic Habits by James Clear, where he talks about coming back to the things and doing them daily, to the point where it becomes automated for you. And you can use that to get into flow state.

So to summarize: do one thing at a time, practice regularly, and avoid distractions.

This is what my workday looks like. So we have meetings — we converse, listen to customers, we think about the topic, we are trying to be thoughtful and present. But then we have to take notes. So notes — disruptive, right? All of a sudden I'm not talking. We have to prepare for presentation. Jot down notes. I'm writing, writing, writing, thinking about the flow, trying to articulate my research. Then I have to come up with designs, make it visually appealing. Well now I'm worried — graphic design. Build software — requirements, code. Great, developing. Making sure code works, developing, testing, deploying, developing. Great — all of a sudden it doesn't work. Now I can't find the right resource. I'm out of my flow. And I don't know who to go to; depending on other resources' schedule — so again, I'm out of flow, right?

And sometimes, yeah, I just don't want to do any of those things regardless of what the other things are. I don't wanna take notes, I don't wanna write code, I don't wanna prepare for presentations — and all the other use cases there captured by the special characters.

So I need a helper. I need AI, right? Not this AI [robot] — enter Gen AI. Looks simpler, looks like this. You have a prompt, you get a response. You write something, you get things started, and then you ask questions and it responds to you. Sometimes it hallucinates, but it responds, right? It's there.

All of a sudden — all the generative AI tools, I'm not gonna go into that — all of a sudden my meetings: transcribed, summarized, and shared. Don't have to do any of that stuff. Presentation prep, visuals — created by a few prompts. Building software — AI coding assistants and a whole bunch of other tools. I don't need to get out of the flow. I don't need to switch context, which takes me out of the flow. So gone are mundane tasks. I don't have to worry about them. I don't have to worry about things that I don't do. I'm able to get to and stay in flow state more often, thanks to Gen AI. It's like having Einstein in my laptop. And you know, he doesn't tire, he's very smart, and he helps me all the time. Great.

Now think about what recording videos was like. In the past you needed a whole camera crew, and you needed to have the right lighting — you had to have all these resources. But nowadays, one person, one phone, one camera, you can have an entire presentation, or a video, upload it to YouTube and then get millions of views, and you can be successful at that.

So similarly, with Gen AI and the tools, think about all of the levels of productivity and creativity you can unlock — and stay in flow state. Or maybe it has nothing to do with that, right? Maybe to you, it's about maximizing times and moments that you care about, staying in those moments, and just enjoying the best of what life has to offer and creating more of that for you in the moment.

Thank you.