A few months ago I realized something uncomfortable: the skills I was trained on were not going to be the ones that mattered most in the decade ahead.

I was halfway through my MSc in International Business at George Washington when I started noticing a pattern. Every serious conversation about the future of global business — about supply chains, about talent, about markets — eventually turned into a conversation about technology. About AI. About automation. About things I understood in theory but had never built with my own hands. I could speak about them in an interview. I could reference them in a paper. What I couldn't do was touch them.

So I did something slightly ridiculous for someone who had spent years learning to think like a lawyer: I opened VS Code.

The uncomfortable part

The first week, nothing worked. I didn't know what a terminal was. I thought npm was a typo. I spent forty minutes trying to figure out why my homepage kept showing "Hello World" instead of my name, only to realize I had saved the file in the wrong folder. I broke the same thing three times in a row. I Googled questions so basic I felt embarrassed even typing them.

It was humbling in the way that being a beginner always is — the same feeling I had during my first day in a corporate office, or my first international meeting where everyone around the table knew something I didn't. The temptation, when you're used to being competent, is to retreat to the things you already know well. To keep polishing what you've already mastered instead of starting something new where you're obviously bad.

But here's the thing about that feeling: once you're past the shame of not knowing, you notice something else. You are learning incredibly fast. Faster than you have in years. Because nothing is automatic, every small win feels earned. The progress is visible in a way it hasn't been for a long time — and that turns out to be one of the most energizing things I've experienced in my professional life.

What this actually means

I don't think I'll become a software engineer. I don't want to.

What I want is to understand — really understand — how the tools reshaping every industry actually work. To sit in a strategy meeting and ask the right questions about AI procurement. To read a pitch deck and know which technical claims are plausible and which aren't. To negotiate a partnership with a tech company and speak a language closer to theirs than to the one I was trained in. To be the person in the room who doesn't nod politely when someone says "we'll just automate it."

International business, at its best, has always been about translation — between cultures, between markets, between regulatory environments, between the way two different countries think about risk. Now there's a new language to translate: the language of machines, data, and systems that increasingly run global commerce. It's not optional anymore. It's the baseline for anyone who wants to operate at the intersection of industries, where most of the interesting problems now live.

The future won't belong to the people who only speak one of these languages. It'll belong to those fluent in both — and, more importantly, in the space between them. The people who can walk into a room of engineers and a room of executives, and make each understand what the other actually needs.

What's next

This website is my first real project. It's imperfect, still changing, and I've probably written this article more times than I've written most briefs. Every time I think I'm done, I find something to refine — a spacing that feels off, a sentence that reads better another way, a feature I hadn't thought of yesterday.

But it exists. And it was built by someone who, three months ago, couldn't have opened a terminal without googling it first.

That seems like a reasonable place to start.