Sep 24, 2025 - Politics & Policy
Be bionic: What they don't teach you in college
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
This column offers college students (and everyone younger and older) a very specific action plan to excel in the next decade.
- Mike Allen and I, at first jokingly and now seriously, call this: being bionic.
- Here's the gist of it: Take all the scary things around you, and turn them into useful force multipliers so you can live better and more successfully.
💡 Why it matters: It's one thing to keep hope and perspective in turbulent times. It's next-level to understand and exploit the unfolding new reality so you can prosper in it.
I can hear it now: "Whoa, Jim, you're freaking me out with this bionic stuff!"
- Stick with me: We study successful people, young and old, all day, every day. This recipe is based on what's transpiring in front of and inside all of us.
These four steps — all available for free — will help you thrive, personally and professionally:
- 🤖 AI yourself. Starting today, learn how to use ChatGPT, Grok or any free or premium LLM to optimize your personal obligations and professional work. AI will make you exponentially more efficient and more capable. Soon, AI inequality — the gap between proficient AI users and the rest — will be the defining characteristic of success vs. struggle at work, especially for those newly entering the workforce. Replace social media or gaming time with AI practice. It's more fun and useful.
- 🧠 Bionicize your brain. Social media algorithms are controlling more and more of our brains, often pumping nonsense or anxiety into them. Few of us are powerful enough to resist the algorithmic addictiveness. But, if you unplug your brain from social media and fill it instead with high-quality information — available via podcasts, books, YouTube, Axios, Substack and more — you'll flourish.
- 🥦 Optimize you. Almost every expert who studies any dimension of mental and physical health comes to the exact same conclusions. So listen to them. Eat real, healthy, protein-packed foods. Purge fake and ultra-processed garbage. Exercise daily, even if it's just a walk. Lift some weights. Sleep 7+ hours. Make and keep real, human friendships. Minimize booze and screen time. Do all of this, all free, and you'll be in the top 5% for setting yourself up to lengthen your healthspan.
- 😇 Be moral. Another free, easy, life-changing hack: Take the time to read, listen to, and think about values you want to live by. What are your personal red lines about how you treat yourself and others? That is your compass, your morality. Set it, or you'll get lost. Read, pray, meditate, study those you admire. Form your own personal moral structure — then reinforce it, and lean on it when tough times hit.
The bottom line: Feel directionless? Hopeless? Do these four things and you'll feel instant change. And vastly improve your chances of professional success.
- 📱Tell Jim about YOUR experience: [email protected].
