Like many people, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett followed a parent’s career path: His father owned a stock brokerage firm before later embarking on a political career.

Needless to say, the younger Buffett stuck with investing and did quite well. When he stepped down as CEO at the end of last year, Berkshire Hathaway was worth more than $1 trillion. But crucially, Buffett said, he didn’t receive any parental pressure to follow that path.

“He said that — which was very important — he had no feeling that I should follow in his footsteps. Period,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy.”

On the contrary, Buffett recalled his dad paraphrasing a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

In other words, you have to find your own calling. It’s advice Buffett said he passed down to the next generation of his family.

“I told my own kids … look for the job you’d take if you didn’t need a job,” Buffet said. “And that’s basically what my dad was telling me.”

Buffett has frequently said that he latched onto his lifelong fascination with making money at an early age.

“I found the answer when I was five,” said Buffett, who spent his youth selling gum and delivering newspapers, among other enterprises. He bought his first stock at age 11. “And it was just interesting to me — way more interesting to me than it was to my dad.”

For people who need to graduate from kindergarten before finding their raison d’etre, finding the kind of job you’d do without a paycheck may require some trial and error — along with taking some jobs just to survive, Buffett said.   

“Economic realities, I acknowledge, may interfere with that kind of search,” he wrote in his 2021 letter to shareholders. “Even so, I urge the students never to give up the quest, for when they find that sort of job, they will no longer be ‘working.’”

One good bet, Buffett has said, is to gravitate toward high-quality people you love to work with.

“Who you associate with is just enormously important,” he said at the annual meeting of Berkshire shareholders in May. “Don’t expect that you’ll make every decision right on that, but you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.”

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Tech giants like Amazon and Meta are overhauling their performance review systems, and experts say the changes could signal even more layoffs or firings ahead.

Amazon, which on Jan. 28 announced 16,000 layoffs on top of its 14,000 cuts in October, is asking corporate employees to submit three to five “accomplishments,” Business Insider reported last month, citing people familiar with the matter and an internal document viewed by BI. The report notes the company has asked questions to that effect before but says this marks the first time Amazon has “explicitly formalized” its system across its entire corporate workforce around individual accomplishments.

At Meta, which in January announced layoffs affecting 1,000 employees, workers will now be categorized into the top 20%, a middle 70%, a lower 7% and the bottom 3%, BI separately reported, citing an internal employee memo. Top performers with “truly exceptional impact” will now see rewards of up to 300% of their base bonus.

“We’re evolving our performance program to simplify it and placing greater emphasis on rewarding outstanding performance,” a Meta spokesperson told Make It. “While our employees have always been held to a high-performance, impact-based culture, this new direction allows for more frequent feedback and recognition in a more efficient way.” Amazon did not provide comment to Make It.

Stack ranking, as in Meta’s system, isn’t uncommon in large companies, particularly in tech. “It’s not just stick, it’s also carrot,” says Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program and the Entrepreneurship Hub at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Nor is it new (or all that surprising) for an employer to ask workers to recap their accomplishments for the year when doing their performance reviews.

But the changes are also unfolding against a backdrop of mass layoffs from both firms, and across the broader economy. Job cuts announced last month hit their highest January total since 2009, according to a report released last week by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

When it comes to performance review crackdowns, “the most common reason companies do this is that they really want to shrink headcount,” says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources.

“It’s cheaper to fire people for poor performance than it is to lay them off,” Cappelli says.

Executives sometimes believe supervisors aren’t tough enough on “finding people who aren’t performing and doing something about it,” Cappelli says. Overhauling performance mandates, in tandem with changes like return-to-office orders and heightened surveillance to enforce those mandates, could mark an attempt to “regain power and control” following the employees’ labor market of the Great Resignation.

Companies may still be continuing to “right-size” after overhiring during the pandemic tech boom, Chaudhuri adds. During that time, “companies needed employees; they just couldn’t keep up,” Chaudhuri says. “Now, that’s not the case; now they want the highest performers.”

Companies may want staffers to spell out their accomplishments because “reporting relationships have been rearranged” after layoffs hit middle management ranks, Chaudhuri says. Managers suddenly taking on reports from other laid-off managers may not know the full extent of their new reports’ work.

Leaders might also be taking a page from Elon Musk’s book, Chaudhuri says. DOGE during its cost- and job-cutting drive asked federal workers to submit a list each week detailing what they got done.

Pressure from shareholders and the race to beat out competitors in the AI wars factor into the efficiency drive.

“This is an era of ferment,” Chaudhuri says, referring to AI. “Each business at every turn, especially when there’s a disruption, has to evaluate how they can run in the leanest fashion.”

U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts last month, up 118% from 49,795 cuts announced last January, and up 205% from 35,553 cuts announced in December, according to the Challenger report. (Roughly 40% of last month’s cut announcements come from Amazon and UPS alone.) The unemployment rate steadily ticked upwards over 2025 and hit a four-year high of 4.6% in November. 

In this context, the changes to performance reviews could have far-reaching repercussions. Fear of additional layoffs down the road and heightened scrutiny around day-to-day performance expectations could put the pressure on employees to work harder, Chaudhuri says.

It could also nudge employees who might be reviewed poorly to leave on their own to avoid potentially being cut, he adds. While this could save the companies some money on possible severance costs in the short term, the overhaul could ultimately be costly for the companies’ reputations.

When the labor market swings back in employees’ favor, companies will “have to make the incentives so strong for people to overlook the reputational downsides that might happen from this,” Chaudhuri says.

For now, Chaudhuri interprets the message tech companies are sending their employees to be this: “I need to work long hours, I need to put my best foot forward. It’s that time again.”

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When our kids come to us with their boredom, there is often an impulse to meet them with irritation, frustration and guilt.

“You have so many toys! How can you be bored?” “Bored? Here’s a list of chores.” “When I was a kid, I played for hours without complaining.”

As a parenting expert who has spent 10 years working with busy families on independent play, I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: parents either offer a list of activities or tell kids to figure it out themselves. Neither works. The first creates dependence. The second feels like a rejection.

The truth is, we can’t, and shouldn’t, entertain our children constantly. Over-involvement leads to burnout for parents and robs kids of essential developmental skills. 

So the next time your kids tell you that they are bored, try these five phrases to encourage more independent play: 

The first question you can ask yourself when you kid says “I’m bored” is: “Have I truly connected with my child today?”

Not “I made your lunch” connected or “I nagged you to brush your teeth” connected. Real eye-contact, undistracted, even-for-two-minutes connection. Something like, “Tell me more about the show you watched this morning. You were laughing so hard!”

Many children are used to being told what to do and how to do it, and when no one is directing them, they feel lost. Sometimes, “I’m bored” just means “I need you,” or, “I don’t know what to do without guidance.” 

A quick connection reset can help fill their emotional cup enough for them to feel more comfortable and confident playing on their own. 

Are they missing something basic, like food, rest, movement or emotional regulation? “I’m bored” can also be their body’s way of saying, “Help, I’m off.”

When was the last time they ate? Have they been sitting still for two hours? Did they wake up at 5 a.m. and refuse a nap? Sometimes, “I’m bored” is actually “my blood sugar dropped,” “I’ve been cooped up inside,” or, “I’m exhausted but don’t know how to wind down.”

Before redirecting them to play, try: “I’m wondering if your body needs something first. It’s almost lunchtime. Are you feeling hungry?” Or, “We’ve been inside all morning. Would it feel good to run around the backyard for five minutes?” 

Once those needs are taken care of, you can hand the reins back to them.

This phrase flips the script. Now they’re the ones declining your help, not being denied it.

It’s playful, takes the heat off, and assumes they already know what they want — they just haven’t figured it out yet.

This works because you’re giving them a framework and inviting them to collaborate, not solving the problem for them.

You’re asking them to check in with themselves: What are they actually in the mood for right now? And both answers — either repeating the idea they already know, or wanting to try something new — are fine. You’re just teaching them how to identify what they want.

Over time, their problem-solving skills will improve. They’ll learn to say “I’m bored. Okay, do I want to do something I already know, or try something new? Maybe I’ll rebuild that fort from last week. But this time, I’ll add a tunnel.”

Once you’ve confirmed that connection and basic needs are met, acknowledge that sitting with boredom is uncomfortable.

You can add: “I’m going to be [folding laundry or making dinner] right here if you want to check in.” With this approach, they aren’t being left alone with their feelings, and you’re giving them space to work through it … but with you as a steady presence.

What you’re really teaching is how to generate purpose from the inside out, not from a toy, a screen, or from you. Your child might need to check in a few times: “Is this okay?” “Can I use this?” 

Children need to learn that boredom isn’t a crisis, and that they can use the feeling to inform what they can do next.

Lizzie Assa, MsED, is the founder of the popular Substack and Instagram, The Workspace for Children, and the author of ”But I’m Bored.”

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If Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were a student today, he says he’d focus on the physical sciences.

During a trip to Beijing on Wednesday, Huang was asked by a journalist: “If you are a 22-year-old version of Jensen [who] just graduated today in 2025 but with the same ambition, what would you focus on?”

To that, the Nvidia CEO said: “For the young, 20-year-old Jensen, that’s graduated now, he probably would have chosen … more of the physical sciences than the software sciences,” adding that he actually graduated two years early from college, at age 20.

Physical science, as opposed to life science, is a broad branch that focuses on the study of non-living systems, including physics, chemistry, astronomy and earth sciences.

Huang got his electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1984 before earning his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992, according to his LinkedIn profile.

About a year later, in April 1993, Huang co-founded Nvidia with fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem over a meal at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California. Under Huang’s leadership as CEO, the chipmaker has now become the world’s most valuable company.

Nvidia also became the world’s first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap last week.

Although Huang didn’t explain why he says he’d study the physical sciences if he were a student again today, the tech founder has been very bullish on “Physical AI” or what he calls the “next wave.”

Over the past decade and a half, the world has moved through multiple phases of artificial intelligence, he explained in April at The Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, D.C.

“Modern AI really came into consciousness about 12 to 14 years ago, when AlexNet came out and computer vision saw its big, giant breakthrough,” Huang said at the forum.

AlexNet was a computer model unveiled during a 2012 competition that demonstrated the ability of machines to recognize images using deep learning, helping spark the modern AI boom.

This first wave is called ‘Perception AI,’ Huang said.

Then, came the second wave called “Generative AI,” “which is where the AI model has learned how to understand the meaning of the information but [also] translate it” into different languages, images, code and more.

“We’re now in this age called ‘Reasoning AI’… where you now have AI that can understand, it can generate, [and] solve problems and recognize conditions that we’ve never seen before,” he said. Artificial intelligence, in its current state, can solve problems using reasoning.

“Reasoning AI allows you to produce a form of digital robots. We call them agentic AI,” said Huang. These AI agents are essentially “digital workforce robots” capable of reasoning, he added. Today, AI agents are a key focus among many tech companies, such as Microsoft and Salesforce.

Looking ahead, the next wave is “Physical AI,” said Huang.

“The next wave requires us to understand things like the laws of physics, friction, inertia, cause and effect,” said Huang in Washington, D.C., in April.

Physical reasoning abilities, such as the concept of object permanence — or the fact that objects continue to exist even if they’re out of sight — will be big in this next phase of artificial intelligence, he said.

Applications of physical reasoning include predicting outcomes, such as where a ball will roll, understanding how much force is needed to grip an object without damaging it and inferring the presence of a pedestrian behind a car.

“And when you take that physical AI and then you put it into a physical object called a robot, you get robotics,” he added. “This is really, really important for us now, because we’re building plants and factories all over the United States.”

“So hopefully, in the next 10 years, as we build out this new generation of plants and factories, they’re highly robotic and they’re helping us deal with the severe labor shortage that we have all over the world,” said Huang.

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More than 100 years ago, IQ (intelligence quotient) established what it means to be intelligent. Then came along EQ, which broadened the meaning with emotional intelligence.

Both were helpful frameworks for the time and context which they emerged, but now our world in-flux demands something new: AQ (agility quotient), which I define as the ability to handle change, uncertainty, and the unknown. As an executive coach to founders and CEOs, I’ve found that AQ is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a non-negotiable orientation toward life.

In my new book, “AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing,” I break down the four AQ Archetypes. Identifying yours can help you understand the skills you have at your disposal for handling stress, solving problems, and tackling crises.

This is you if…

• You know what habits work for you and you stick with them.
• In your personal relationships, you value people who have known you for the longest time.
• You will take calculated risks if there is a solid plan in place.
• When faced with an unexpected challenge, you initially feel worried: How can I fix this situation?

Neurosurgeons are motivated by excellence: They hold every aspect of their life to the highest of standards, moving with diligence, conscientiousness, and hard-won expertise.

Strengths: The Neurosurgeon is steadfast and determined. Once they commit to something, they never give up until they’ve succeeded. Neurosurgeons are also a steady and stabilizing force for everyone in their lives, and a source of incredible expertise at work.

Challenges: The Neurosurgeon’s perfectionism can become a fear of failure. They see the world with more skepticism than optimism, and this leads to them saying no to change more than they say yes. They are slow in times of turmoil.

Antidote: The Neurosurgeon must learn to befriend discomfort. They grow by forcing action and decisions at a faster pace than what is typical for them, extending the boundaries of their comfort zone.

This is you if…

• You regularly try out new habits and try to improve what works for you.
• At work, you need lots of space and freedom in your schedule.
• You will take risks if it creates more autonomy for independence.
• When faced with an unexpected challenge, you initially feel annoyed: This wasn’t part of my plan!

Novelists are motivated by freedom: They are unafraid to deviate from the past; thus, they thrive in situations where they are allowed to change directions whenever they want. Freedom gives them the agency to write their own story.

Strengths: The future-­forward Novelist is at the leading edge of their field and up-­to-­date on the latest news. There’s always a bold goal, a big insight, or an exciting book to discuss. Their enthusiasm for proactive change is inspiring to those around them.

Challenges: The Novelist uses change as a way to avoid difficult situations. In hard times, they’d rather pivot than persevere to the finish. Also, when unwanted change rocks the Novelist’s world, they can become overwhelmed and lash out.

Antidote: The Novelist only grows once they learn how to let go of their plans and expectations. When change happens, they must work hard to fight their natural inclinations and embrace reality. Peace comes for the Novelist once they can see the silver lining in unwanted change.

This is you if…

• The wilder a situation gets, the calmer and more focused you become.
• You’re so skilled at in-the-moment responses that you can often neglect planful, future-oriented endeavors. You figure, Everything is always changing. Why waste time with plans that won’t stick?
• You’ll take risks when you have the capacity to deal with the outcome.
• When faced with an unexpected challenge, you initially feel calm: Life is always in flux anyway.

Firefighters are motivated by impact: The Firefighter is an expert at fixing what others believe to be unfixable. Doing work that really matters is a necessity, and they thrive on seeing the tangible results of their efforts.

Strengths: The Firefighter excels when most people would feel stressed out, anxious, or paralyzed. They have an upbeat attitude and a calm demeanor. They see possibility in impossible situations and aren’t deterred by setbacks and surprises. In fact, these shocks keep the Firefighter’s mind sharp and alert.

Challenges: All the time spent fighting fires leaves very little room to be intentional and strategic about the future. Because they do well in emergencies, the Firefighter can tolerate high levels of stress, and sometimes may create chaotic situations, because that’s where they feel comfortable.

Antidote: The Firefighter must push themself to become as adept with proactive change as they are with unwanted change, making the time on a quarterly or annual basis to draw up big­-picture plans.

This is you if…

• You believe that imagination is more important than knowledge.
• You believe that risks are essential to innovation and progress.
• You truly believe that you can do anything you put your mind to.
• When faced with an unexpected challenge, you initially feel accepting: This isn’t what I wanted, but I can make it work.

The Astronaut is motivated by passion: Astronauts follow their passion, whether personal or professional. Their vivid interests and curiosities inform every action and decision. Their intense enthusiasm drowns out any fear, so they hardly register big shifts that can unravel other people.

Strengths: The Astronaut is fast. They are quick to evolve and pivot, moving more swiftly than the other Archetypes. Another gift is authenticity. They are unapologetically themselves, with a unique approach to their life. This combination of speed and passion creates a bold and decisive personality

Challenges: The Astronaut can be so absorbed in their passion that they overlook the boring and tedious details needed to embark on their grand adventure. They may feel like they’re making great strides mentally, but that progress isn’t always reflected in the real world. The Astronaut’s goals may stall from poor follow­through or difficulty rallying others behind their vision.

Antidote: In order to make the most of their natural agility, the Astronaut must learn how to slow down to translate their bold aspirations into digestible and logical components. To find success, they must buckle down to complete the tasks and responsibilities that aren’t their passion but are still necessary.

Even if there were parts of your archetype’s description that didn’t feel 100% like you, don’t dwell on them. The purpose of this exercise is not to match your paradigm perfectly but to give you a thematic lens for self-observation.

These archetypes are intended to be maps, not photorealistic portraits, and like the best maps, they allow for many possible routes. The primary goal is to spend time appreciating you.

Liz Tran is an executive coach to CEOs and leaders and the founder of an AI coaching startup, Inner Genius. She is also the author of the new book ”AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing.” Her work has been featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, TODAY and Bloomberg.

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