Every day you choose who you’re going to be.

You do it by interpreting the world around you and deciding who you are in relation to it.

It’s almost instantaneous.

A prospect avoids you. An employee lets you down. A contractor ghosts you.

Notice how quickly we collapse what happened with the story we tell ourselves.

What actually happened was: 

-the prospect didn’t reply to the email 

-the employee didn’t complete the project 

-the contractor didn’t return the call

Our experience is shaped by three things: the story we tell ourselves, who we believe we are, and the state we’re in.

The Question 

Let’s apply this to something bigger than your business: AI. 

Even if you’re not using AI as a thinking partner yet, people around you are. Your customers, suppliers and colleagues.  

The question isn’t whether AI will affect you. It will.

The question is who you’ll be in the face of it.

Some people will experience it as a threat. Others will experience it as an opportunity. 

What will shape your experience is the story you tell yourself about what AI means, who you believe you are in relation to it, and the state you’re in each day.

When Ford created the Model T, most people thought they just needed a faster horse, not a machine. 

The businesses built around horse transportation disappeared, and new industries sprung up around cars.

When electricity spread, people saw it as a replacement for gas lamps and candles. But it didn’t just improve lighting. 

It also transformed manufacturing, communication, and the way we design cities.

AI is not just another useful tool. It’s an enabling technology with a reach greater than anything we’ve seen before.

It will affect medicine, education, science, business, and wealth in ways we can’t fully predict or grasp. 

Like electricity, it will become part of the infrastructure. Like cars, entire industries will be reorganized around it. 

But unlike either one, AI expands our capacity to think. 

The edge used to come from what you knew, how fast you were, and how much you could produce. 

With AI, knowledge, speed and production is becoming easier and cheaper. 

Your advantage now is about creativity, discernment, presence under pressure, and how well you apply intelligence, not just possess it.

The hardest part of any change is rarely the technology. It’s who you become in response to it. 

What I Got Wrong

We used to build custom data warehouses onsite for big clients. Then cloud hosting became a thing, and clients wanted us to store and manage their data too.

My first response was not euphoria. It was fear.

I focused on everything it would cost: more of my money, rebuilding and rebranding our solutions, hiring technical people with skills I didn’t have, letting some employees go, and taking on much more risk.

Of course I was afraid with that as my focus.

What made it so hard wasn’t the technology. It was the meaning I made of it, the way I saw myself, and the state I was in. 

I made it mean danger, saw myself as the one who had to do it all, and felt exhausted and overwhelmed.

The breaking point came after a major conflict with my VP of Product Development over a technical decision. He felt micromanaged. I felt held hostage.

The real crisis wasn’t technical. It was who I was being in relation to it.

I couldn’t keep being the technical expert and also be the CEO. I had to let one version of myself go.

Then I had to learn a different way to lead: trust, delegate, evaluate, iterate.

I also had to give myself space to think and strategize, and make room for meditation and exercise exactly when I felt too busy to do either.

There was nothing unique or magical about what I did. It wasn’t graceful. I fumbled the ball plenty of times. 

But slowly I realized that who I was being was even more important than what I was doing. 

Your Self-Concept

Here’s what I learned from that experience: the meaning you make of any situation arises from who you believe you are. 

Change your self-concept and the meaning changes with it. 

I stopped seeing the market shift as a threat the moment I stopped seeing myself as small. 

That’s the work. And it’s a practice.

How you see yourself comes from what you believe. And beliefs are simply thoughts you’ve accepted as true. 

Which means you can change them.

A book that helped me with this was Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza. 

What it taught me is that repetition alone isn’t enough. Emotion is what wires a new belief into your identity. 

You have to feel the new you, not just think it.

AI is not just a technology challenge. It’s a self-concept challenge. 

The meaning you make of it comes from who you believe you are in relation to it. 

And that’s completely up to you.