I continue to be blown away by ChatGPT. This is a game changer!
One of my biggest misses in my life is missed opportunities converting my ideas in starting up my own company. It's not like my ideas were not great, it's that I lacked the follow-through and risk-taking to get started executing once my idea was validated. I would spend so much time researching, doing the market analysis, identifying opportunity, writing up the idea and then failing to take it further forward. Here's one example - the start-up research I did for my original personametry idea about the application of monitoring physiological signals that can help manage mental well-being, like stress before this topic hit mainstream. Check my Trello workspace if you're curious.
I spent a good 300+ hours doing the research and thinking of the opportunity. I'd wake up at 4am every morning, doing the research, before starting my official work-day at 8.30am, after doing the school run. I also invested in working a 4-day work-week to create space for researching my ideas, because my goal then in 2015/16, was to startup a product company. Since I was consulting, I could manage my own time and take a hit on my earnings because my personal goal was important at the time literally putting my money where my mouth is. Unfortunately the consulting work got busy, and my personal life went a little off-balance, that made me rethink my focus areas - so I left start-up ideas aside. If you've read my posts on my RAGE model tracking, I dropped the start-up ideas focus since 3-4 years ago. Work, Life & Family took priority over my aspirations of booting my own start-up entrepreneur.
Until now, with ChatGPT in the mix, I'm reconsidering my options. I can save so much time, exploring my ideas without compromising my other life streams. All I need is to timebox at least an hour each day, and a couple hours over weekends to get back into tackling my backlog of 100+ ideas that were sitting on the shelf that last few years.
My latest thesis is this: As I enter into the second half of my working life, with at least another 20 years left to work in a career - I need to be doing more purposeful work during my core work hours and not as side volunteering gig. Since being a Muslim is at the centre of all my decisions across my life and work streams (part of the reason I left a CTO job had to do with staying true to my personal moral value system: example - promoting video content I'm not comfortable with, targeting people to spend time on endless watching of video for entertainment wasting hours of life away, building gambling and sports content betting technology, etc. This is why I joined AWS and decided to get inside the engine room in B2B enterprise systems but it's been a tough adjustment after 20 years building consumer apps). So, now I want to be spending my time working on impactful, value adding streams. As a Muslim, we believe in investing for the Akhirah (the next world). My ultimate BHAG was about becoming financially independent before retirement so that I could start an NGO/NPO focused on socially beneficial projects. Unfortunately, I'm very, very far from this goal. The other option was to join an NPO/NGO and contribute my skills as a GM/CTO/Manager, earning a reduced salary but at least I'll be happy doing good work. Alas, my searches to date have yielded nothing material (living in South Africa is also a limiting factor). So my latest idea - why don't I find opportunities in the Islamic Tech space? After all, I am a seasoned technology leader, surely there are opportunities in the Islamic tech space worth checking out? The total addressable market for Islamic Tech is 1 billion+ people. Introducing tech for this space initially (which would scale to the entire planet maybe), benefiting the ummah, in this world and the next, would be something, wouldn't it?
This is where ChatGPT came in to help. In the past, I'd outsource the research to some gig worker and pay up to $10 per hour for a research report. Or, I would spend hours of my own time, doing the research. No more! With ChatGPT, I can do the initial research in just one hour!!
I am still to dive deep into the research, during my weekends - but I'd like to share with my readers, and especially for the muslim professionals out there, similar to me, looking to find opportunities to contribute to spiritually uplifting projects (either community or paid-for work), the amazing power of ChatGPT.
I'm not leaving my current job anytime soon though, insha Allah (although this is never guaranteed especially when there's real uncertainty now with Amazon's latest round of layoffs).
I am however, being open about a topic that is becoming increasingly important and relevant to the aging workforce - as people approach their fifties, their stage of work-life changes from chasing the career ladder to seeking fulfilment, doing work they can feel proud of, to leave a legacy behind, to leave the world in a much better state they found it. That's where my head is at. I am not interested in chasing the next promotion. If promo comes my way, it should be an organic, natural result of my sincere contributions, backed up by people who value my contributions. I want to invest my time wisely doing work that matters to me. Right now, my work is about building leaders and growing people, being the modern elder. Ideally, it would be great if I could find something that builds up my Akhirah points and also get paid for it at the same time :-)
Here's the transcript of ChatGPT as my research assistant:
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