Chad’s Blog
Pragmatic Technologies for Life and Business Success®
This is issue 700. Every Wednesday since the first week of January 2013, for more than thirteen years, I have shown up in your inbox without missing a week. That is the milestone, and I am proud of it. But the number is not what I want you to take from today.
What matters is what stayed fixed while everything around it changed. For 700 weeks, through five different versions of who my company was, the mission never moved. I am here to help transform ourselves and our clients by leveraging whatever technology actually matters at the time. The vision has been constant. The tools beneath it have not. That tension is the entire story of my career, and it is the story I want to tell you on the occasion of this milestone, because it is the same story you are living right now.
From the Stage to the Screen
I did not start as a technologist. In my teens and into my twenties I was a professional musician. I studied music in college, a jazz guitarist with every intention of becoming a composer and a studio recording artist. That was the plan. Then, while still in school, I fell in love with something I had not expected: software development. The logic, the creativity, the act of building something from nothing on a screen. It captured me the way music had. So, I changed my focus to computer science, and that decision turned me into the software developer I became early in my career.
Here is the part that matters. I never abandoned the music. To this day I play and entertain alongside my wife for Shabbat services in our community. I did not stop being a musician in order to become a technologist. I added one identity to the other. That is the first thing I learned about transformation, decades before AI made the lesson urgent for everyone else: reinvention is not subtraction. You do not erase who you were. You carry it forward.
The Climb That Built the Business
For nearly 25 years, my company was a software development firm. I wrote code, then built a team of programmers, and together we developed software solutions for our clients. But the real growth of my business did not come from writing more code. It came from a deliberate decision to step away from the keyboard and operate where the leverage actually lived.
I became a business and marketing strategist and a business developer, for my own company and for my clients. The value was never in producing the deliverable. It was in the vision and the judgment that directed it, the ability to see what a business actually needed and architect the path and drive it to real outcomes and results. I moved up the value chain, and that is where the transformation of my clients began, because business development and strategy, not lines of code, are what change a company’s trajectory. If that conviction sounds familiar, it should. For the past several months I have been telling you that judgment and strategy are what endure as AI commoditizes production. I did not arrive at that belief recently. I have been living it for a quarter of a century.
The Medium Kept Changing
Then the internet rewrote what the work even was. Web presence became the foundation of every business, and my company transformed again, from a software developer into an internet and web development company. Years later, digital content creation layered on top, and it dramatically extended our ability to help ourselves and our clients build and publish powerful content that reaches the right audience. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with photography too and learned that field the way I had learned the others, because mastering a new domain has always been how I stay alive to the work.
Each of these was a transformation. None of them erased the one before. The software developer informed the web strategist. The web strategist informed the content creator. The pattern is the throughline.
The medium changed five times. The mission never did.
And then came AI.
What AI Actually Changed
AI did not change my altitude. I am still a strategist and a business developer, and that is still where my focus and my commitment live. What AI changed is my reach.
Let me show you exactly what I mean. My team and I recently built two applications. One is the AI Insider Lab member portal, designed to complement everything our AI Insiders are doing inside the Lab. The other is ProPromptGenius, an app I developed to help professionals work with AI more effectively. An app of this kind would once have required my full team roughly eight to twelve weeks to develop. We shaped the former in roughly two weeks and the latter in four days.
I want to be precise about why, because it would be easy to misread. My early years close to the code gave me a fluency that let me move fast on this particular build. But the door AI opened is not reserved just for former developers. The distance between a clear vision and a working solution has collapsed for everyone. What determines the quality of what you build is no longer whether you can write the code. It is the clarity of the thinking that directs it. That is exactly why I encourage the Insiders in the Lab to push their own boundaries with AI. One has already built his own application, and I am blown away by it. Others are learning to use AI as a genuine thinking partner that challenges their assumptions and sharpens their judgment. Different starting points, the same direction: each of them is challenging themselves toward real transformation. My focus never moved back to building software. My ability to direct it simply became immediate.
Permission Through Demonstration, at the Scale of a Career
A few weeks ago, I wrote that the real barrier to AI adoption is not learning the technology. It is the fear of becoming someone new. I understand that fear, and I want to answer it with the only thing that has ever disarmed it for me.
I have become someone new five times. A musician became a software developer. A developer became a strategist and business developer. A strategist became a web and internet expert, then a content creator, and now someone whose entire fascination, for the past three years and the years ahead, is AI. Every one of those transformations happened in public, on a weekly schedule, in front of you. And I am more myself than I have ever been.
This is Permission Through Demonstration at the scale of an entire career. Reinvention is not the loss of identity. It is your throughline finding a new medium to express itself. The transformation of ourselves always comes before the transformation of our clients, and after 700 weeks I can tell you with complete conviction that it never ends, and that it never has to cost you who you are.
The next medium is already here. The professionals who will thrive are the ones who let it transform how they work and think rather than waiting for permission to begin. That is precisely the work happening inside the AI Insider Lab, now in its third month, where serious professionals are leveraging AI to sharpen their strategy and their business development rather than outsource their thinking. If reading this stirred something in you, the recognition that it might be your turn to transform again, I would welcome a conversation about what that looks like.
Here is to the next 700.
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