The skill that matters most

AI has increased labor supply. If we go back to Economics 101 - when supply increases, price goes down. Meaning - more competition for the same roles and less salary for each role.

So what do we do?

I used to think there were two routes. One is efficiency - be the best at capturing existing demand. I think most employees fall into this bucket. Two is differentiation - create demand that doesn’t exist yet. I think founders tend to fall into this bucket more.

I think the game has changed.

Even if our job is efficiency - we now have to do more to create demand for ourself to get into the room in the first place. Differentiation also gets commoditized. The founders who built LinkedIn audiences in 2021 are now competing with thousands of people running the exact same playbook. Every channel degrades when enough people start gaming it. Whatever makes it distinctive today has a shelf life.

I believe the most important skill going forward is re-invention.

The people who sustain an edge will need to differentiate continuously - they keep finding the next thing before the current thing gets crowded. This is product-market fit, applied to oneself.

Think about Taylor Swift. She has reinvented herself completely, multiple times. Country. Pop. Folklore. Each time, before the previous version ran out of road.

I don’t think this is a skill that most of us trained for nor did we get rewarded for it. Most careers were built on depth - go deep in one thing, become the expert, get rewarded for it. That model assumed the world was stable enough for depth to compound. It’s less stable now.