When Rob Ott and I were in college, we had to sign into the computer lab just to set up an email address. No cell phones. No inbox in your pocket. And everyone told us there wouldn’t be any jobs when we graduated.
Thirty years later we’re still friends. Our kids are hearing the same warning.
Rob is an executive coach now. Before that he built a career in cancer research and ran business operations in the corporate world. He left that role and went looking for what came next right as ChatGPT hit its inflection point in 2022. He saw it early. The technology would move as fast as it moves. The people would be slower.
That’s the heart of his new book, The Relevance Advantage. It starts with a fear social scientists now have a name for. FOBO. The fear of becoming obsolete.
You know the feeling. You built a career. You put years into a set of skills. Now a machine does some of it faster, better and cheaper.
Rob doesn’t argue with that, and I love that he doesn’t. Most AI books sell you the tool or sell you the panic. Rob concedes the speed, then points to what the machine can’t touch. If you’re mid- or late-career, you’re sitting on the answer. Judgment. Experience. Wisdom.
That’s why I reached out to him. I run my business with Claude as a systems operator. It keeps my invoices moving and my CRM current. Nobody hires me for that. They hire me for 30 years of judgment. Rob calls it a moat. What’s inside is yours. Everything outside is fair game for the tools.
His framework, TRUST, is built for the people who freeze. Target where you’re going. Recognize what’s resisting you. Undertake small experiments instead of jumping in at step 17. Steady yourself through the messy middle. Transform.
The part that stays with me is the one he’s still working out. Kids coming out of college were told the tools were cheating. Now they’re walking into offices where nobody knows how to teach them. How do you build judgment when the reps that used to build it are gone?
He doesn’t have that answer yet. He’s writing toward it.
In the meantime, he’s coaching an 80-year-old solar engineer on AI. The man is flying.
The Relevance Advantage is in presale right now. Rob is my friend, and this is the book I wish every one of my clients had on their desk. Support it here: books.manuscripts.com/product/the-relevance-advantage
Key Quotes
“It feels like this machine can do what I do faster, better, cheaper. And I think that that’s true, and I’m not going to refute that.” — Rob Ott
“A lot of people with AI will jump in at step 17 and say, oh my God, what is this? And they’ll get freaked out and close the computer and walk away.” — Rob Ott
“When you commoditize intelligence, it changes the way you’re going to build that judgment.” — Rob Ott
Takeaway
Speed was never what they hired you for. Judgment was.
