Book Recommendation: Super Skill by Joe Lazer (tl;dr: Storytelling is the new coding)
I just finished Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age by Joe Lazer (Amazon) and posted this review on Goodreads. 5 stars.
I normally avoid new books. I'd rather spend time with "foundational" books than whatever's hot right now. This one manages to be both.
The premise is almost too clean, and yet I find it genuinely compelling:
1. AI is being optimized primarily for coding, not writing. Among other reasons, because the training data on coding is much better than on writing.
2. The skills most valuable in an AI world, e.g. critical thinking, persuasion, leadership, all share a core skill: storytelling.
Therefore, storytelling is the "super skill" of the AI age.
More importantly — shocker of all shockers for business books — the rest of the book actually delivers on the premise. It's foundational in terms of storytelling principles (the elements of story via RENT: relatability, ease, novelty, and tension; Kurt Vonnegut's shapes of stories) while also being modern and practical in exactly the right ways (a table of prompts built on the book's principles for using Claude to edit your writing; immediately usable).
The stories throughout are engaging and actually useful, which is atypical for a business book. The whole thing is well-organized in a way that makes it easy to refer back to.
I've always known intellectually that storytelling matters, but never managed to prioritize it. It never felt necessary. For the first time, I'm both convinced to prioritize it and clear on how to actually learn it.
I started writing a series of posts on my origin story to practice the principles in this book.
Let me know how I did!
Highly recommended.