Frustration vs Tenacity — Surviving the Intimidating AI Meeting

Some of these AI meetings make me feel like I'll never be good enough.

You know the ones. A genuinely brilliant engineer starts walking through their setup, and within two minutes you're lost. The shiny new object, the framework you've never heard of, the workflow three layers past where you are. You nod along. You can barely follow.

You walk away with a pit in your stomach. Look at everything I don't know. Look how far ahead they are. Am I ever going to catch up?

I've had that thought more than I'd like to admit. Thirty years in this field and I can still leave a Zoom feeling like a beginner.

But here's what I've learned to do with that feeling.

Instead of letting it bury me, I dwell on it. I sit with the parts I didn't understand. And a funny thing happens — when I stop panicking and actually turn it over, I realize I understood more than I thought. That one piece wasn't so foreign. That approach — I could try a version of that. The thing that felt impossible in the moment breaks down into one or two things I can actually attempt.

So I try them. And a few more skills get added to the pile.

That's the whole game right now. Not being the smartest person in the meeting. Being the one who refuses to walk away empty-handed — even from the meetings that made you feel small.

Frustration and tenacity come from the same moment. The difference is what you do the next morning.

The intimidating people aren't the threat. They're the free lesson. You just have to be stubborn enough to mine it after the sting wears off.

The fight to keep learning this stuff never really stops. I've made peace with that. Honestly, I've come to like it.