Hi there,
Have you seen this movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once?
Gif by a24 on Giphy
It's about a woman running a laundromat who's drowning in tax paperwork and family chaos. She's stretched so thin she's lost touch with who she is and what matters to her.
And then the multiverse cracks open and she's flooded with every possible version of herself, every path she could have taken, every choice she didn't make.
It's overwhelming and chaotic and absurd.
But the whole point of the movie is that when everything is possible and nothing makes sense, the only thing that grounds you is knowing what you care about.
I feel like this movie is the most accurate description of what’s happening across all industries, sectors and peoples life choices right now.
Let me explain.
I spent over a decade in corporate and whether you've been in corporate or not, I think most of us used the same playbook: invite McKinsey consultants to give you insights, look at what's working in your industry, find the benchmark, study the competition, figure out your next steps and do the work, benchmark again and share how humbled you are about the company progress on your LinkedIn.
There was always a starting point to any proejct that “made sense”.
Everyone was always so afraid to be behind and the industry benchmarking felt like a safe space. Learning from someone ahead of you who'd already figured out the path and then deciding on the course of action.
When I became an enterpreneur, the same rules seemed to apply.
Analyze what’s working for your competition and do that, copy what’s woking or use the “proven blueprint“ and you are all set.
I don't think any of this makes sense anymore.
The pace of change right now, specifically in AI but honestly in everything connected to it, is so fast that insights from a week ago are already outdated.
The status quo from last Monday doesn't exist by Friday.
Let’s take Anthropic as the example that makes this very “real“ real.
If you read my newsletter for the past few months breaking down the Anthropic vs. ChatGPT drama, you would now that things have shifted big time in this space.
The numbers alone are hard to wrap your head around. Claude’s website went from 16 million monthly visits in January 2025 to over 220 million by January 2026.
That's 13x in twelve months.
Revenue went from $1 billion in 2024 to a $14 billion run-rate by February this year, and reportedly close to $19 billion by March.
The numbers aren't the interesting part though. The interesting part is HOW.
Anthropic (as an underdog that most people haven’t heard of just 6 months ago) didn't get here by following OpenAI's playbook.
When the Pentagon offered them a $200 million contract, they said no because the terms would have allowed their AI to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO said: "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request."
And then something interesting happened.
People rallied behind them.
There was this snowball effect of public support and #quitchatgpt movement that nobody could have planned for.
Of course, it wasn't just the Pentagon moment. OpenAI had its own issues playing out at the same time meanwhile Claude just kept shipping.
Feature after feature after feature, consistently breaking the frame of what’s possible and beyond what anyone expected, while the company was standing its ground on values.
No analyst could have predicted this.
No McKinsey consultant sat down and mapped out a strategy where turning down $200 million from the US military is the move that makes you the fastest-growing AI company in the world.
That wasn't in any framework.
That came from knowing what they stood for and being willing to act on it when it cost them something.
I’ve heard Dan Koe saying this the other day, that really gives a similar angle but translated to our personal life.
"The single most important thing you can do in today's world is to just stop operating from the old worldview, from the old way of doing things. Go to school, get a job, retire at 65. The thing to pay attention to is just being told what to do next. Most people aren't okay with not knowing what to do next. They have to know, 'Okay, what comes after school? What comes after the job?' They're not okay with uncertainty; they're not okay with risk, and they don't understand that risk and uncertainty are how you get outsized results, different results from everyone else in humanity. If you always need to be told what to do next, then the outcome of your life is quite literally in other people's hands.
You must learn how to direct your own work, your own life. You must learn how to tolerate and mitigate risk and uncertainty. You must figure out what you want and then teach yourself everything necessary to do that thing. Yes, it's extremely difficult, but not as difficult as the silent suffering that most people go through on a daily basis by not pursuing what they want."
I think this is exactly what's happening right now, on every level, in every industry, in every company and on every human’s personal level.
I think we're all staring at a blank slate right now, whether we like it or not.
The old model of waiting until you have enough information to make the "right" decision doesn't hold up when things change faster than you can digest it.
Knowledge used to be the moat. Whoever knew the most, won.
I think the moat now is how fluid you are and how much you trust yourself when there's no one ahead of you to tell you how to do things.
That's soooo uncomfortable.
I know because I feel it every single week.
As soon as I think I'm getting a handle on things, there's already a new shift, a new thing I haven't even had time to learn yet.
So what skills are we actually supposed to be building right now?
Not the AI-related ones (you know by now those matter), I mean the deeper muscles.
The ones that help you function when the ground keeps moving under your feet.
I keep coming back to four:
Listen to yourself. When I sit down to write this newsletter every Friday, I'm not checking what's trending or what other creators are covering or running my topic through some engagement formula. I ask myself what I'm curious about, what have I leaned and what I actually want to share. That's where my best ideas live, in whatever I'm pulled toward in that moment, not in a spreadsheet of content ideas to cover.
Trust your own ideas before you have proof. This is hard, especially if you haven't seen results yet. But I've found that if you keep taking steps even when nothing seems to be working, something eventually shifts. You learn, you stack a new skill on top of that, you try the next thing even when the last one didn't land. And you keep doing that for longer than feels reasonable. The dopamine doesn't arrive on schedule, and if you can sit with that discomfort and keep going, you'll be okay.
Get comfortable being a total beginner. The pace of change means we're all beginners now, over and over again. The people who do well in this won't be the ones who already know the most. They'll be the ones who can drop what they knew yesterday and pick up something new without it threatening their entire identity.
Shorten the gap between idea and action. The old model was research, plan, validate, execute. Right now, by the time you finish researching, the thing you were researching has already changed. I'm not saying be saying not to listen to insights (Claude research can help you with that), I'm saying the cost of waiting too long is now higher than the cost of being wrong.
If you're in that space where everything feels like too much, here are a few things I'd actually try this week:
1. Take 15 minutes with a blank page. Not your phone, not a Notion template, not someone else’s blueprint. Actual paper. Write down what you're curious about right now, what feels interesting, what you'd work on even if nobody was watching. Just get it out of your head without judgement.
2. Pick one thing from that list and do something about it within 48 hours. Skip the full plan. Just take one concrete action: write 200 words, record a 60-second voice note, send one message, sign up for one thing. The goal is to close the gap between thinking and doing.
3. Try this prompt (I've been using a version of it myself multiple times):
"I'm feeling overwhelmed right now [explain why]. I have these ideas: [list them]. Help me sort through which one I could take a small, concrete action on this week, not the biggest or most strategic one, but the one that feels most alive to me right now. Ask me questions to help me figure out which one that is."
To be honest I'm writing this partly for you, but mostly for me.
We are in the liminal space.
Everything is possible and nothing is certain, and that's equal parts exciting and terrifying.
I don't think the answer is to find the right framework or the right playbook or wait till you have certain information or confidence.
I think it's closer to what Anthropic did, whether they'd put it this way or not: figure out what you believe in and move on in that direction.
Until next week,
Your AI Solopreneur Bestie,
Elena
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