Michelle: The single most dangerous question in modern careers isn't "What's my salary?" It's "What do you do for a living?" Mark: Whoa, hold on. That's the first question everyone asks at a party. How can that be dangerous? It's just small talk. Michelle: That's what we think! But that question, and our answer to it, is setting us up for failure. Today, we're going to explain why, and it's a wild ride. Mark: I'm intrigued. This sounds like it's going to turn my next networking event upside down. Michelle: It just might. And this whole idea comes from a book that’s become a bit of a roadmap for navigating this chaos: The Adaptation Advantage by Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley. Mark: Right, and what’s fascinating about the authors is their background. You have McGowan, a future-of-work strategist who came from academia and design, paired with Shipley, a Silicon Valley veteran. It’s like they merged two different worlds to diagnose what’s happening to all of us. Michelle: Exactly. They saw this massive gap between how we're taught to think about careers and what the world actually demands now. And their book, which has been widely acclaimed in leadership circles, is their answer to bridging that gap. Mark: Okay, so if 'What do you do?' is the wrong question, what's the problem it's causing? Why is my job title a trap?

Michelle: Because the world that supported a stable job title is gone. The authors argue we're living through three massive "climate changes" happening all at once. There's the technological climate change—AI, automation, you know the drill. Then there's the market climate change—globalization, digital platforms. And finally, there's actual environmental climate change, which is also reshaping economies. All three are accelerating at an exponential rate. Mark: It feels like we're all on a treadmill that's speeding up, and we don't know where the 'off' button is. Michelle: There is no off button. And that's why tying our identity to a single, static thing—like "I am an accountant" or "I am a marketing manager"—is so risky. The book cites this incredible projection from the Foundation for Young Australians: a young person graduating today can expect to have 17 different jobs across five different industries in their lifetime. Mark: Seventeen jobs? That's not a career ladder; that's a career jungle gym. A very chaotic one. How can you have an identity in that? Michelle: You can't, if your identity is based on the job. And this is where the book introduces a brilliant and slightly terrifying story to illustrate the problem with how we think about performance and roles. It's the story of the "Super Chickens." Mark: Super Chickens? Okay, you have my full attention. This sounds like a B-movie plot. Michelle: It does, but it's a real experiment by an evolutionary biologist at Purdue named William Muir. He wanted to see how to make hens more productive—you know, lay more eggs. So he set up two experiments. In the first, he created a flock of average, everyday chickens and just let them be for six generations. Mark: A control group. Makes sense. Michelle: In the second group, he took only the most individually productive hen from each cage—the "super chicken"—and bred them with other super chickens. He did this for six generations, thinking he was breeding a master race of egg-layers. Mark: That sounds like the logic of every corporation's performance review system. Promote the stars, create a team of all-stars. What happened? Michelle: Catastrophe. After six generations, the flock of average chickens was doing great. They were plump, healthy, and their egg production had increased by 160%. Mark: Wow! And the Super Chickens? Michelle: He came back to the Super Chicken flock and found only three hens were left. The rest had been pecked to death. The "star performers" had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest. They were bullies. They were aggressive. They literally killed the competition. Mark: That is… horrifyingly familiar. I've seen this in offices! The superstar salesperson who hoards leads and creates a toxic culture, and management celebrates them because their individual numbers look good. Michelle: Precisely! The book uses this to argue that our obsession with individual roles and titles—with being the "super chicken"—is destroying the flock, the very system that allows for real, sustainable productivity. We're so focused on our job title that we forget that success is a team sport, a cultural phenomenon. Mark: So my job title isn't just a trap for me, it might be making me a worse team member without me even realizing it. Michelle: It can. It narrows our focus and makes us see colleagues as competitors rather than collaborators. In a world that demands constant adaptation and teamwork, that mindset is a death sentence for a company, and for a career.

Michelle: And that's exactly why the authors argue the solution isn't to find a 'better' job title, but to let go of the need for one altogether. It's about shifting your entire mindset. Mark: Letting go sounds great, but it's terrifying. Your job is your security, your status. It’s how you introduce yourself. How do you just… let that go? Michelle: The book argues that the illusion of security is the real trap. The real security comes from your ability to learn and adapt. And to do that, you have to detach your identity from what you do, and re-attach it to why you do it. They tell the classic parable of the three stonecutters. Mark: Oh, I think I've heard this one. Michelle: A traveler asks three stonecutters what they're doing. The first one grumbles, "I'm cutting stone." The second says, "I'm the best stonecutter in the country." But the third one looks up with a gleam in his eye and says, "I am building a cathedral." Mark: Right. The first is the job, the second is the skill, the third is the purpose. Michelle: Exactly. The book argues we need to be the third stonecutter. Your purpose—your "why"—can stay with you across those 17 different jobs. Your job title will change, your skills will need updating, but your purpose is the anchor. And this mindset shift requires something else we're all terrified of: failure. Mark: Ah, yes. The F-word. We're taught our whole lives to avoid it. Michelle: But the book frames it beautifully. It says, "Failure is not a bug of learning, it's the feature." And the most powerful example of this is the story of Steve Jobs. Mark: Everyone knows his success story, but the failure part is often glossed over. Michelle: We forget how devastating it was. He co-founded Apple, it was his baby. And then, in 1985, he was publicly and humiliatingly fired. In a commencement speech years later, he said he felt like he had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. He was a very public failure. Mark: I can't even imagine. To be kicked out of your own creation. Michelle: But then he said something profound: "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, not so sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." Mark: The lightness of being a beginner. Wow. So the failure wasn't an end. It was a reboot. Michelle: A total reboot! It forced him to shed his identity as "the guy who runs Apple" and rediscover his purpose: building beautiful tools for humanity. That's when he started NeXT and Pixar. The failure was the catalyst for his greatest successes. He had to let go of his old identity to find a much more powerful one. Mark: So how is this different from the cliché advice to just 'follow your passion'? That advice has gotten a lot of criticism lately. Michelle: That's a great question. The book makes a subtle but crucial distinction. "Following your passion" implies a single, static destination. The adaptation advantage is about embracing a continuous process of learning and reinvention. It's not about finding one thing you love, but about loving the process of learning itself, driven by a core purpose. It's a mindset, not a job title.

Mark: Okay, so we let go of our job titles, we embrace learning and failure as part of the process... but what do we actually do? What skills should we be building if the old ones are becoming obsolete? Michelle: This is my favorite part of the book, because it's so optimistic. The authors call it the "Rise of the Humans." The core idea is that as technology and AI handle more of the routine, predictable, and computational work—what they call "silicon cognition"—the economic value shifts dramatically to the things only humans can do. Mark: You mean "organic cognition"? Michelle: Exactly! Our uniquely human skills: creativity, collaboration, empathy, complex problem-solving, ethical judgment. The book argues that for decades, we've been training people to act more like computers—to be efficient, to follow rules, to be predictable. Now, we need to do the opposite. We need to double down on our humanity. Mark: That sounds great, but is there any hard evidence for this? Or is it just a hopeful theory? Michelle: There's powerful evidence. And it comes from the most data-obsessed company on the planet: Google. In 2012, they launched a massive internal study called Project Aristotle. They wanted to find the secret formula for the perfect, high-performing team. Mark: Of course they did. I picture them with spreadsheets analyzing everything from the IQ of team members to what they ate for lunch. Michelle: They basically did! They looked at every variable you can imagine: educational backgrounds, personality types, gender balance, how often teammates socialized outside of work. And after years of research, they found… nothing. None of those things correlated with team success. Mark: So the most data-driven company on earth failed to find a data-driven answer? Michelle: They did, but not the one they expected. The answer wasn't in who was on the team. It was in how the team members interacted. And the number one, most important factor that separated the good teams from the great ones was a concept called "psychological safety." Mark: Psychological safety. So, what does that mean? It sounds a bit like corporate-speak for 'everyone feels good.' Michelle: It's much deeper than that. The lead researcher, Amy Edmondson, defines it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In simple terms, it's a culture where you feel safe to say "I made a mistake," or "I don't know the answer," or "I have a crazy idea that might not work," without fear of being humiliated or punished. Mark: Wait a minute. So Google's big data project concluded that the most important thing for high performance is... feelings? Being able to be vulnerable with each other? Michelle: That's the revolutionary insight! It's not just about being nice. It's about creating a culture where vulnerability is not a weakness, but the prerequisite for learning and innovation. When people feel safe, they share information freely, they learn from their mistakes, and they unlock their collective intelligence. Mark: That's the complete opposite of the Super Chickens. That was a world of zero psychological safety, where any sign of weakness got you pecked to death. Michelle: You nailed it. The Super Chicken model is about individual armor. The Project Aristotle model is about collective trust. And in a world of constant change, the book's argument is that the trusting, collaborative, human-centered team will always, always outperform the team of isolated, aggressive superstars. Your humanity isn't a soft skill anymore; it's the ultimate competitive advantage.

Mark: So, the whole journey of this book seems to be a paradox. In a world that feels like it's being taken over by technology, the path forward is to become more deeply, unapologetically human. Michelle: Exactly. The 'Adaptation Advantage' isn't about learning to code faster than an AI or becoming a better robot. It's about realizing that our ability to learn, to connect, to be vulnerable, and to create is the one thing that can't be automated. The book's ultimate message is that your resilience doesn't come from your resume; it comes from your humanity. Mark: It’s a fundamental shift from seeing ourselves as a collection of skills to seeing ourselves as a work in progress. That's both a little scary and incredibly liberating. Michelle: It is. And it leaves us with a really powerful question to reflect on. So the question for all of us to think about is: what part of your identity is tied to your job title, and what would be left if you let it go? Mark: That's a heavy one. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Does your job define you? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. It's a topic that affects every single one of us. Michelle: It really does. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.