"...it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself." — Leon C. Megginson on Darwin's Origin of Species
Rapid unpredictability is the new normal. The good news: adaptability is learnable.
Last week, I was about halfway through a four-hour AI workshop in Raleigh when the main projector died. Not a loose cable, not temporarily lost power...it completely died.
The IT team couldn't bring it back. The backup screens in the adjoining rooms still worked, but the main screen was just gone. That sucks for an AI workshop. People need to see a screen.
What happened next surprised me. The audience got up out of their chairs and started moving. At first, I thought they were leaving.
They weren't. They relocated to the adjacent rooms and stood where they could see the side monitors.
Within a couple of minutes, the room directly in front of me was almost empty. I could still see some of the audience in the other rooms, but it was difficult to connect with them. As you can imagine, this is a very unsettling experience for a public speaker.
It felt like the speaker-audience connection was broken, but I kept teaching anyway.
I was nervous about the feedback scores, but to my surprise, they came in at 9.64 out of 10. Not because I performed under pressure. Because the room adapted with me when I committed to keep moving. The event was still a success, and it was a success because of our collective adaptability.
That moment reminded me of the importance of adaptability.
Most operators do the opposite of what that Raleigh room did. They freeze in the face of change. Wait for things to settle down. Things are not going to settle down. The ground will keep moving. Sometimes for the better. The people you lead are watching to see whether you move with it.
Then this happened: Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Three days later, the US government forced them to shut it down. People had already started building real things with Fable 5. By Friday evening, their builds were unplugged.
Yet again, forced to adapt.
I wondered: is adaptation actually a skill you can build? Or are some people just wired for it and the rest aren't?
I went looking for an answer. Turns out there's a name for this: Adaptability Quotient (AQ). It's been studied for years. Fast Company called it "the new EQ" back in 2018. There are books on it now, certified practitioners, and assessments like AQai's that score you on it.
And the research is clear: AQ is learnable. It's not a fixed personality trait. There are specific muscles you can build to raise yours. I'll get into the five muscles below.
If AQ is a real thing (and the research says it is), then five specific muscles raise your score. These are from the AQai framework. I've ordered them from easiest to hardest to act on this week.
Mindset. Are you optimistic about change or pessimistic? AQ research separates "fixed" from "growth." The action: catch yourself the next time something changes in your business. If your first internal sentence is "this is going to suck," replace it with "this is going to be interesting." Repetition rewires the default.
Mental flexibility. Can you hold two opposing ideas at the same time? Operators who can ("AI will replace some of my work AND make me 10x more valuable") adapt faster than operators who pick a side and dig in. The action: once a week, take a position you hold strongly and write down the strongest case against it. Don't have to publish it. Just write it.
Resilience. How fast do you recover from setbacks? The action: shorten the recovery window. Most people give themselves a week to recover from a real setback. Try 24 hours. Same setback, faster bounce. The muscle is the speed of the return, not the size of the hit.
Grit. Will you stay on the long-term goal when the short-term tool breaks? The action: write down your one-year business goal. Then write down which AI tool you're depending on right now. Notice they're different. Tools change. The goal doesn't have to.
Unlearn. Can you let go of what used to work? The action: pick one thing you taught yourself two years ago about how to use AI that's now outdated. Stop doing it this week. The faster you can drop what's no longer true, the more room you have for what is.
Pick one. Work it for a week. See what happens.
I keep a folder I call my personal-context-vault. It's a handful of plain markdown files about me: my brand voice, my business background, my memories, my preferences, my life stories, and more. Anytime I start working in a new AI tool, I point it to my vault so that tool knows me from minute one. No retraining.
The point is simple. Your context shouldn't live inside one platform. It should live with you, ready to drop into whatever tool the world hands you next.
Try this in 10 minutes:
Go to whichever AI tool currently has the most context about you and your business. For most people that's ChatGPT or Claude.
Paste this prompt: "Export a skill file that I can take to another AI tool so it can accurately speak in my brand voice."
It will give you a plain-English document (a .md file). Save it to your personal-context-vault folder. Title it something like your-name-voice.md.
Run this second prompt: "Export all my memories and instructions as a single document I can take to another AI tool."
Save that one in your same vault folder. These two files will be the beginning of your personal context vault that paints a beautiful picture of you, in a way that AI can understand it.
Note: Setting up a custom MCP server is a more sophisticated next step. It gives any AI tool persistent access to your context without you having to paste files in. That's a little more complex, and we walk through it inside the OpenClaw Kings community, which you can join here for 4 weeks free.
This week on King Moves (How to Clone Yourself and Get Superpowers | Ep. 135), Justin and I get into something that hits today's theme directly. Adaptability has always been a hireable trait. Now it's more important than ever.
I think in the next few years, the employee model itself fades. You won't be hired as a person who shows up at one company for thirty years. You'll be hired as a person plus your AI workforce, evaluated on how fast you adapt to whatever's next. Whether you're a freelancer, an employee, or a firm, people are watching how you handle change. And they're choosing the adaptable.
I could be wrong. These are predictions. But this one feels like it's already starting.
Stop playing life on hard mode. Automate your success.
Until next time,
Ethan King
A.I. Automation for Business Growth
Keynote Speaker | Author | CEO | Strategist
ethan@ethanking.com
P.S. The paperback of Done: Let A.I. Do Your Work So You Can Live Your Life is now live on Amazon.
I told you last week it was coming. It's here. If you've been waiting for a physical copy you can underline, dog-ear, and hand to a team member, this is it.
If you've already read it in another format, the easiest thing you can do to help is leave a quick review. This helps Amazon's algorithm show the book to more people.
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P.P.S. If you've been on the fence about getting OpenClaw + Hermes Agents for yourself, the window is closing. Date and time: Saturday, June 27, 10 AM-2 PM ET
This is the small-group online session where I walk you through setting up your own AI agents and putting them to work on your actual business. The kind of agent that emails a meeting organizer on your behalf while you're on a plane. The kind that builds your context suitcase so you're never locked into one tool.
Spots are intentionally limited to keep class sizes manageable. Join the interest list here: youropenclawstrategy.com
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