It's the Age of AI 🤖

🍥 Life

Hey friend! How’s it going??

Now that I have a home, the one thing that I’ve been focused on is establishing habits.

From the Huberman podcast episode I talked about in a previous newsletter, I realized I probably have a low baseline of dopamine. This is why I’m so often in a state where I want to do something but just can’t muster up the motivation (aka. dopamine) to do it and kinda just lay there.

AI rendition - not too off tbh 😅

So I’m also trying to establish some new habits that have been shown to help boost baseline levels of dopamine.

These are:

😴 Waking up and sleeping at the same time. Getting adequate sleep is a huge contributor to baseline dopamine.

☀️ Morning sunlight. 5 - 10 minutes of sunlight, especially in the morning has been shown to boost dopamine throughout the day.

🚿 Cold showers. This can boost your baseline dopamine for hours after. It also works to help you get out of a procrastination spiral by spiking your dopamine.

Sleeping and waking at the same time always makes me feel better, even though I do struggle to be consistent. I feel like the morning sunlight has had a subtle effect and the cold showers have worked really well even though I absolutely hate it, which I do understand is the point. 😅

Have you tried any of these before? Will report back how it goes!

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I’ve been really into the Huberman Lab podcast recently. There’s another episode that I thought was really cool called Rick Ruben: How to Access Your Creativity. Link to the Youtube video.

Rick Ruben is one of the most renowned music producers and has worked with a wide range of artists, including Run DMC, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, JayZ, Adele, and Kayne West. They talked about a lot of topics surrounding creativity, what it is, and how to access it to elevate any activity or profession.

I also think one of the biggest misconceptions is that technical work is not creative. I greatly disagree and I think a lot of this conversation is super applicable to people who code and other STEM fields.

They also referenced parts of his book called “The Creative Act: A Way of Being". I bought the audiobook version but haven’t started yet. Really excited to listen this week!

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👨‍💻 What I’m Working On

1 week until Lonely Octopus applications open!! We’ll be taking 48 octopi 🐙🐙 Here’s a bit more detail. 💜

Lonely Octopus is about crafting your unique dream career.

When I quit my job in March 2022, it was just before the first round of Meta layoffs, during which 11,000 of my former colleagues lost their jobs. This was followed by another round in November.

Another round occurred on April 22nd this year, and it seems there will be an additional round later this year, affecting 25,000 more people. This trend is resonating across the tech industry, once considered the "most resilient industry." The layoffs that have been happening across various industries have finally reached tech.

from layoffs.fyi

As the layoffs continued, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Suddenly, AI products flooded the market, and tech giants like Microsoft and Google competed to integrate AI into their existing products. Companies that would normally hire a full time data professional or software engineer are instead looking into part time employees and AI tools. 

When I quit my job in 2022, I made this video where I talked about a vision for my life: I wanted to achieve financial, time, and intellectual freedom. Back then, it was just a dream, but now, I think it’s become a necessity. With an unstable global economy, looming recession, and AI transforming the workplace, I knew I had to pivot Lonely Octopus's vision to empower people to take control of their careers.

This includes:

💪 Taking the layoffs as a lesson to never entrust your career to a single employer. The only person you should trust with your career is yourself because you are the only person who 100% has your best interest at heart. ❤️

💸 Diversifying your income stream. When companies lay off full time employees, they tend to replace them with contractors, freelancers, and other part-time employees. You should consider diversifying your income by supplementing your current income with one or more of these part-time jobs.

🌴 Taking advantage of remote work. A lot of jobs, especially contract and freelance roles can be fully remote. If you’ve ever considered remote work, this could be a good opportunity. For example, you could do work for a 🇺🇸 US based company and making USD 💵, yet living in a low cost place like 🇹🇭 Thailand for a fraction of your pay.

👨‍💻 Learning to code and leverage AI. As companies strive to integrate AI into their operations, there's never been a better time to learn to code and leverage AI. A combination of coding and AI skills is a highly valuable and unique skill set.

⭐ Learning to embrace self-studying and crafting your own career. Instead of letting other people dictate your career - or even worse waiting for layoffs to impact you - I think it’s time to rethink your dream career and carve your own path.

many arms can code many faster 🐙

So whether it's to recession-proof your full-time job, kickstart a freelance career, or upskill with AI tools to boost your own productivity, I really do think now is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn to code, leverage AI, and craft your own dream career.

For this Age of AI cohort 🤖, the custom study plan that you would get will have a strong emphasis on learning how to use AI tools, alongside other coding and data science subjects. I shared one in the previous newsletter if you want to check it out!

If you’re interested in diversifying your income through freelancing, we also have a full technical freelancer course AND expanded our repertoire of projects to include real freelance projects from our industry partners so that you build out your portfolio and develop freelancing skills from day 1. Sneak peak at some of our industry partners:

AI Product Lab - A startup dedicated to building and testing AI SAAS products.

Winson Chen Acupuncture - A Bay Area local acupuncture clinic in service for 35 years, committed to bringing acupuncture to the modern person.

LEARN Media - A social media agency that empowers independent education content creators.

Let me know your thoughts! Would you like to see some of the projects in the collection? 💜

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🌻 Cool Internet Stuff

I’ve been playing around a lot with Midjourney, which is an app that generates AI art from prompts. So what I’ve been doing is using ChatGPT to generate prompts for Midjourney. Here’s an example:

ChatGPT prompt 👇

I adapted this from someone else’s prompt but I forgot the source so apologies for no creds

This is what it gave me:

Wow these are definitely creative - kinda makes me feel sad

Now putting it into Midjourney…

and we get 👇

somehow the octopus actually looks sad

I think Midjourney understood its assignment. Those octopi look so sad…I need to make myself feel better with a happy octopus now!

guess the prompt lol

Have you tried Midjourney or any other AI tools? Lmk in the comments your favorites - I’d love to try them out. 🤗

P.S. All constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina