Career

All of human civilization has always followed the same underlying structure: ideas are abundant, but execution is what creates value. For most of history, the ability to get things done determined who won and who didn’t. Everyone knows what kinds of activities are considered useful—working out, learning a foreign language, reading, building products, starting projects. And everyone also knows this: wanting to do something is rarely the bottleneck. The real constraint has always been execution. Companies are built around execution. Management exists to keep execution from going off track. Salaries exist to make people willing to execute. Education exists to give people the ability to execute. Venture capital invests in execution as well. You have an idea, I have an idea—who gets the money? The one who can make it real. After Agents, a single person with a single weekend can build what previously required an entire team working for half a year. Everyone now has nearly unlimited execution power. We have entered the age of spectacle. At this moment, “getting things done” has shifted from being a scarce resource to basic infrastructure. And once that happens, we are forced to rethink the question of value: what, exactly, is still worth something? ...

The most dangerous mistake knowledge workers can make today is not “not knowing how to use AI.” It’s believing they still have twenty years to adapt. They don’t. We may be the first generation in history forced to watch our core professional abilities overtaken by machines — in the middle of our own careers. It wasn’t like this before. The steam engine replaced muscle. The loom replaced hands. Cars replaced legs. For two hundred years, physical labor was automated. Cognitive labor remained safe. Machines could be powerful, but they didn’t think. That assumption broke in 2023. By 2026, the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. Those at the frontier are already burning tokens aggressively, leveraging 10x or 50x productivity gains to pull ahead. Most people still haven’t processed what this means. The holidays are a good time to think it through. Acceleration Is the Real Variable Consider adoption timelines. Electricity took 46 years to reach 50% of American households. The telephone took 35 years. Television 22. The internet 7. Smartphones under 5. ...