I Asked AI to Map Out My Future... and It Gave Me 3 Completely Different Lives

Every time someone asks me what’s next for my life, I freeze. And last week, a conversation with my former boss pushed me to explore that tension using AI in a way I didn’t expect. (And I’m sharing the ENTIRE prompt with you so you can try it too!)

We’re talking all things AI, internet nostalgia, and what I learned when I used Claude to map out three potential “paths” for my career.

In This Episode:

• Betting on a dream vs. the “safer” path that’s less risky
• How I craft thoughtful AI prompts to avoid surface level answers
• The reflection questions that forced me to confront what I think about work
• AI use cases, including my take on AI clones
• The future version of my life that would feel like a “slow death”

Resources & Links:

Get the FREE prompt I used to map out my 3 odysseys, lifeview, and workview

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Learn more about AI Snack Club to join a community of other women mastering AI together

Let's Connect:

Follow me on Instagram: @alisonkinsey or send me an email: alison@alisonkinsey.com. 

Connect with Alison on LinkedIn.

I also help entrepreneurs and thought leaders launch and grow their podcasts through my boutique podcast editing agency, Podcasting for Creatives. 

Transcript

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What's the version of your future self that would feel like a slow death, even if it looked good on paper? It gave me a 13-page Word document. AI can do this and do it so quickly. I feel like at this point, AI is almost impossible to avoid talking about. So I want to dig into it here. Just yesterday morning, I asked Claude to help me reverse engineer one of my goals that I've been thinking about. And it gave me a 13-page Word document. I didn't even ask for a document at all. Like my mind was blown that AI can do this and do it so quickly. I feel like we're living through one of the absolute craziest technological shifts ever in the world. And I'm living it right in the middle of a time where I am on a career break, almost seven months in, which is crazy to say. And I'm reinventing how I think about work, success, ambition. I was a late 80s kid. I was born during the internet boom. I remember dial up internet and when Amazon used to sell just books and CDs. I remember when YouTube was brand new and when websites had Comic Sans font everywhere. And I also remember wanting my own domain name so badly. And my dad wouldn't let me get one because the registration fees were so much higher at the time. I even wrote him an email in 1998 begging for this domain that I wanted. And I told him, I need to have my website on the world wide web or I will be so disappointed. So just imagine a much younger Allison saying that. Now, flash forward many years later, even just in the last four to six weeks, new AI models have been released. AI is becoming way more capable. People are even getting laid off because of AI. And that was something that I feel like a lot of people felt oh, if you say things like that, you're fear mongering. But there was one tech company that made headlines just a couple of weeks ago that laid off like 40% of their workforce. And it was because of AI. They even admitted that. And if you're like me and you spend any amount of time on threads, my algorithm is inundated with some version of should I ditch Chat GPT for Claude? Or it's people being like, oh my God, I used AI to do XYZ task. Like just insert, imagine any autonomous thing you can think of. I even have heard about this playing out with some of our own clients. One of our podcast clients, I was on a call with her a month ago, and she was telling me she needed something to be updated on every single blog post in her blog archive. So on her blog, she had over a hundred posts, talk about lots of repetitive work. And she ended up using Claude Cowork to tackle the task. And it did the entire thing autonomously in two hours. She was telling me it easily would have cost her so much more time and money if she hired it out or had her virtual assistant do it. And I'm in the camp where I don't want to be left behind. I want to be AI competent. I don't want to have 10 years go by and feel like I'm just completely lost when it comes to this stuff. If any of you are in the same boat, there's a phenomenal Slack community for women called the AI Snack Club. And they host tons of virtual events, and it's just a great place to go if you want to learn and get curious and experiment with AI. So I'll leave a link for that in the episode show notes. There's also so much just around the ethics of AI. My friend Brittany went to a conference recently where one of the speakers was hyped the idea of using AI to clone yourself for both video and audio. And I remember when she was telling the story, she was horrified about it. And I feel really uneasy about it too. Like if I'm listening to a podcast episode or I'm watching a video on YouTube, I don't know. Like I want to hear that real person. I don't want to see their AI clone necessarily. I think as much as AI is changing the world, I agree with my friend. I think all of this is going to create an even deeper craving among all of us for IRL experiences and human connection. What would you say is your relationship to AI? I know it's a pretty complex and very layered question. I mean, it can be a polarizing question too. When it comes to my own relationship with AI, I would say I was a fairly early adopter. Interestingly, my first experiences dabbling with AI were actually just for work. And I would use it to distill all of the notes from my sales calls and to help me craft really compelling follow-up emails and ask the right questions and even prepare for calls. All of it was so great for that. Today, I love using it as a thought partner that I can brainstorm with, or if I'm spiraling in decision fatigue, which happens all the time, it can be really helpful with that. I also pay for ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro. And if you've heard people talking about Claude Cowork or Claude Code, you need to have the paid version of Claude to be able to experiment with those specific tools. And my take is that it is 1000% worth it to pay for AI. You can add that to the list of expenses that I could not give up when I was cutting back costs. I also read an article a month ago from a guy named Matt Schumer. He posted this article that got thousands and thousands of views. It went viral. And he was saying that judging AI based on the free tier is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. I'm very much in the camp of like, I want to have the best version that I possibly can. I'm going to pay, I'm going to do the$20 a month to get those versions. So, long story short, I had a catch-up call with my former boss last week, and she was telling me about this book called Designing Your Life. It's by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. And we were just chit-chatting, catching up about life. It was personal, it was work, it was everything. My former boss was telling me she went really deep on this exercise from that book. And it helps you plot out three potential odysseys for your life. So think of it as like these three potential paths that you could go down in your career. And I love thinking about scenarios like this. I always think of alternate paths I could have taken in life. Like, what if I never left New Hampshire for California? What if I never took that one job six years ago or 10 years ago? Where would my life be now? And the book helps you figure out what they call your life view and your work view. So you can find meaningful work that is truly in alignment with your values. After we hung up our chat, I was like, I need to build an AI prompt off of this. I can't magically have the book appear on my doorstep in 30 minutes. So let's build a prompt. I went into Claude and I spent probably a good 45 minutes on this. If there's something I'm really curious about and it involves personal development of some kind, and this is sort of one of my quick hot tips, and maybe some of you listening already do this, but I will have whatever AI tool I'm using help me create the prompt. So rather than me just typing in, like, hey, help me figure out my three odysseys from the book Designing Your Life, I asked it to write its own prompt. And it just added so much detail that it wanted context about in order to effectively give me more than a surface level answer. So I want to share with you some of the questions it wanted me to answer as a part of the prompt. As I'm reading these, think about how they can apply to your own situation. And maybe if you have a pen handy, just jot a couple of these down that you can journal on later. So I'm gonna go through some of the questions. What has energized you most in your career, regardless of the job title or pay? What has drained you most consistently across jobs? What do you believe work is actually for? What do you believe a good life looks like? What are you most afraid of in terms of your future? What would you do if money were not a factor for three years? What's the version of your future self that would feel like a slow death, even if it looked good on paper? And then it wanted me to compile a full work history. So just kind of going through like, what did I do in the past? What did I like, dislike about these different roles? And I'll give you a peek into some of my answers because I thought this was just such a fun exercise. So starting with what has energized me most in my career. I put things like having full autonomy and trust to do my job, aka no micromanaging. I'm not a fan of that. I was also really energized just talking to entrepreneurs and creators. So I did a lot of that in my last job. That was really fun for me. And then what has drained me most consistently? So I put having too many meetings in a day without enough dedicated work blocks. And that was like always the thing that would drain my battery tank so much was just having way too many meetings, including back-to-back meetings. And then, of course, toxic leadership styles, especially ones where leadership doesn't trust the team. Maybe they're avoidant, maybe they're a bit distant and it's not collaborative. And then another one I put was not getting promoted or feeling like there is no growth path. I feel like I'm just wired in that way where I want to feel like there's a next step for me to achieve or unlock in my life. What I'm most afraid of in terms of my future, I'm afraid of failing. That's a really big one. I'm also afraid of not being able to retire when I want to retire because I don't know. Right now I'm not making any money of my own, at least, other than our business. What would I do if money were not a factor for three years? I mean, that's a really interesting one. I feel like I would travel around the country. I would invest in meaningful personal development endeavors. I would be going to retreats, going to conferences. I would hire a variety of different coaches, maybe a life coach, a business coach, a personal trainer, a financial advisor. I would continue this fellowship of being on a career break. I would upgrade all of my equipment. I have an iPhone 13. I would be getting that iPhone 17 with the fancy camera. I would rebuild my wardrobe. I feel like I open my closet and I just don't like 90% of the clothes that I have. I don't know. I would also make monthly donations to local charities and nonprofits that have meaning to me that I want to support. I think I would also just be like, okay, like what other businesses could I start? Could I buy a business? Could I launch a new one? And then you might be wondering, okay, like what is the future version of yourself that would feel like a slow death? So don't mark my words on this because things can shift and change. But right now, I would say going back into tech sales and just getting into that grind again just doesn't feel like the right path for me to take, at least right now. And having to work full-time for someone else. I hope that gives you like a little peek into my world. I submitted all of that info to Claude. And when the results came back, it laid out three completely different paths for my life. I wasn't surprised at the answers. It kind of hit what I was thinking in my own brain. So in option one, I'm going all in on content creation and storytelling, building a media brand about career breaks and unconventional paths. And three years in, it's suggesting I'll be working on a book proposal for my first book. In option two, I'm choosing a slightly safer path. So I'm still building my dream from option one, but a lot slower because I am working part-time, fractionally inside of a creator business. I'm able to generate enough income to live a comfortable life again, but on my own terms. And then in option three, podcasting for creatives expands. If you're new here, this is the podcast editing business. My husband Steve and I run together in this version of our life. Our business grows and we hire more contractors, and I take on a bigger role. I think you guys probably know if you've been listening to the show for very long, which one my heart tugs at. My dream, the no holding back, go all in is option one for sure, but it does carry the most risk financially and even psychologically. I do think there's a world in which I could see myself somewhere in between options one and two. So this kind of scratches the surface. If you do this prompt, you'll actually get a lot more out of this exercise. It will detail what years one, two, and three look like for each of the odysseys, the energy that each one of these evokes, the risks, just how it aligns with you. So that is just one of many ways that I'm using AI to reflect and think about what's next. And if you want the exact prompt to be sent to you so you can try this exercise for yourself, just click the link in the episode show notes below and I'll send it right over. So that is what I've got for this week. Next week, I'm excited to take you through a week in the life of being on a career break. There's a lot of interesting momentum and activities on my calendar. So I'm excited to break it down for you just in a sample week. What does that Monday through Friday actually look like? And I will also tease out that my brick arrived yesterday. If you heard episode three about my terrible screen time habits, you know why I ordered one. So I can't wait to report back on how that plays out. But I will see you next week. I will talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening.