The people who adapt fastest aren’t who you think

Ask people to picture who’s thriving with AI and you get a familiar image: young, technical, already fluent in the language of software. It’s a tidy story. It’s mostly wrong.

The people I watch adapt fastest are all over the map in age and background. What they share isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.

They stayed curious. When something new shows up, their first instinct is to poke at it rather than dismiss it. They’re comfortable not knowing for a little while. They treat being a beginner as a normal, recurring state rather than a humiliation to avoid.

Curiosity, unlike credentials, isn’t handed out by anyone. You can just decide to have it.

That’s a genuinely hopeful thing, because it means the door is not closed to anyone by default. You don’t need to have started young. You don’t need a technical background. You need to be willing to stay interested – and then to have someone meet you there in plain English.