My coast to coast airplane ride mindset: Geoff Colvin’s “Humans Are Underrated. What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will.”
With all the buzz on AI and ChatGPT I was reflecting on this leading edge book from 2015.
The answer lies not in the nature of technology but in the nature of humans.
Regardless of what computers achieve, our greatest advantage lies in what we humans are most powerfully driven to do for and with one another, arising from our deepest, most essentially human abilities:
- empathy;
- creativity;
- social sensitivity;
- storytelling;
- humor;
- building relationships, and
- leadership.
Three Years Later
I wrote this in May 2023, when ChatGPT was new. Since then, AI has moved from novelty to everyday tool. It drafts listing descriptions, summarizes documents and handles much of the process work in our business. Colvin’s point holds up even better now: the more machines take over the process, the more the human skills matter.
Where Humans Still Win
- Empathy: sitting with a seller who’s leaving the family home.
- Storytelling: helping a buyer picture life in a neighborhood.
- Relationships: being the person a past client calls first.
- Leadership: helping an agent through a hard month.
Use AI for the process, and invest the time it saves in people. I wrote more about this in AI Is Taking the Process. Your Job Is to Be Human.
Which human skill are you building this month?
Want help applying this in your brokerage? Book a 30-minute conversation with Mark at calendly.com/mjsession.
