Anika Gakovic

I would say pause to really think about what your own unique interests, values, and strengths are that you want to build upon, because it's so tempting to fall into things. I'm the first one to share my own story of how I've fallen into certain corporate tracks. As hard as it is, and I really feel for young people and the tough labor market environment that they're in, there is also a chance for them to invent their own way, for example through entrepreneurship and other off-the-beaten-path types of trajectories they can pursue. There's no right way, and you're going to have to adjust along the way. However, just falling into something because your parents seem to think it's a good idea, or maybe somebody at school is doing the same thing as your friend, it's a trap that then takes that much longer to get out of, especially if you turn out to be good at it, right? Because you could be good at things that are not fulfilling. So I would just say pausing to do a check around your values, your interests, and what strengths you intentionally want to cultivate. And then I would say, too, continuously connect with people. Connect with people to understand what their experiences have been, what their guidance and perspective is, and just be fearlessly disciplined in reaching out to other people, because eventually that's who's going to open doors for you.

The first one is AI. It's an opportunity because it introduces everything from productivity support to a brainstorming partner to an analysis engine, so that a lot of things we used to do manually, be that designing a learning program or some of the other types of analytics that go into being a knowledge worker, AI can now be a tool for that. And yet it's also a challenge because unless we are very careful about how we prompt and go about using these tools, I think that it's really important to balance that human oversight with the efficiency of a tool like that. The second challenge is trust. I think that as human beings, we're profoundly wired to be social and to want to belong, and yet trust, whether that's in the employment setting or trust among people - look at any social media, and nowadays you have to wonder, is it a deepfake? Is this somebody extracting my data? So I think that trust in this world of acceleration, in a world where unfortunately many relationships have become transactional, there is an even bigger premium on how can we be intentional in building trust in our workplaces and communities.

Value number one is excellence. I've always been ambitious - that's part of that immigrant mindset of proving to my parents that the sacrifice was worth it, as well as my own commitment to doing things the best that I can. So I think excellence is always top of mind. Two, freedom. I love a sense of freedom to conversations, to exploring things. I find that that's some place where the uniqueness of human creativity and innovation can come from. And then I would say the third piece is that sense of connection and how to intentionally build communities where people can flourish together.