Vanessa Chang

I’ve always been “smart.”

If there were an Olympic sport for collecting gold stars, I would have been team captain. Top marks, top schools, top roles. Everyone made the script clear to me: be smart, get rewarded. And I was.

What the script left out, I realized later, was a lot. I was smart, but I had other strengths — ones no one really celebrated. I never got props for reading the room. EQ never got me a promotion.

But that embodied sense, paired with curiosity, kept pulling me down seemingly disparate but infinitely interesting paths: specialty food, media, consumer packaged goods, product development, health and wellness, executive strategy at a mission-driven brand.

All different, but every chapter looped back to the same story — curiosity got me in; being smart kept me there.

So naturally, I over-indexed on the cognitive, the analytical, the things people looked up to me for. Simmering beneath the surface: a champion generalist, someone newly discovered with ADHD, a recovering productivity nerd.

Then November 2022 hit. Cue ChatGPT.

Suddenly there’s a thing doing the cognitive work I’d built my identity and entire self-worth on — and doing it faster and better.

So I found myself asking: who am I if I’m not the smart one?

The resulting panic and searching is where you’re reading this now — where I’m figuring out not just how to become smarter working with AI, especially in my portfolio career, but how I think. Through all those seemingly disparate paths, I’m finding something others, past and present, have already named.

Something that, for now, I can only describe as high tech, deep human.