Being Good Is No Longer Good Enough

For almost the entirety of my life, and the lives of generations before me, finding a route into a good career and fulfilling long term financial goals was clear.

Build a respectable CV with strong qualifications, and apply for as many positions as possible, merely hoping your skillset will be tested when somebody eventually offers you an opportunity to prove yourself.

I believe that model is shifting.

Naval Ravikant, the co-founder of AngelList, argues that a more viable route would be self identification of what you are unusually good at, and scaling that using media as leverage, or as he put it, “productising yourself”. This is fundamentally built upon focussing yourself on what he calls “specific knowledge”: knowledge stemming from genuine personal interests and experience, rather than something that can be taught to everybody.

This gave me a clearer structure for something I had already noticed - being capable of 𝑥 is radically different to being known to be capable of 𝑥, and in a climate where the internet acts as a forum for finding talent, with competition becoming effectively limitless, a company no longer has to rely on a pool of CVs from a limited number of applicants who happened to encounter their listing. Instead, it can receive hundreds or thousands of applications from candidates with broadly similar qualifications, experiences and aspirational career paths.

AI has especially accelerated this process on both sides,in hiring as well as in application processes. With software such as Eightfold AI, in which thousands of applications can be processed by an employer before an HR worker ever sees them, the challenge (more than ever) becomes differentiating oneself from competition, such that an application - which reads very similarly to a cohort of thousands of others - can stand out.

This is why attention is becoming increasingly important; attention of people, the right people.

Someone could be exceptionally capable - but lose out to another person with less experience who is consistently publishing their work, explaining what they are learning, and gaining reputability by association with a particular field. Thus, when an opportunity arises, the second person can leverage this visibility to their advantage.

This changed the way I view self promotion. I previously regarded it as superficial unless it followed significant achievements, but I can now see how advertising work is not separate from building a career, but is in many cases a part of the process itself.

Creating luck

Traditional career development tends to be largely outbound; identification of a company, finding a suitable vacancy, and submitting an application which may persuade someone that you are worth speaking to. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this process, you are entering the process at precisely the same point as competition.

Publishing work could change that dynamic.

Someone that you have never met could read something you wrote six months prior, or stumble across a project you made. Whether that may be a founder finding an analysis of their industry, or a recruiter being able to gain a sense of who you are, your interests, and the way you think - before a first conversation has even taken place.

While it does not automatically create opportunity, using the internet as a platform to publish oneself publicly may be crucial to potentially opening doors to opportunities in the future. There is no way of knowing who might find your work useful or might like the way you think.

In a way, it increases your surface area for luck.

The AI problem

There has been a noticeable drop in the threshold for producing something that appears professional, with most people unable to discern real human intuition from “AI slop”. A competent article can be generated in seconds and projects which in the past would’ve taken entire development teams weeks to complete, can be completed by someone untrained with very little experience.

What becomes increasingly valuable is the part which is more difficult for AI to reproduce: Ravikant’s “specific knowledge”. These are paramount in developing strong judgement, on a human level, as well as on a more analytical project based level.

AI can assist in expressing those ideas by improving wording, structure and presentation of judgement, but it cannot independently experience the underlying factors from which worthwhile ideas stem from.

Paradoxically, as AI makes it even easier to produce more content, judgement from credible human reputation will become increasingly valuable.

What I am trying to do

For me, the objective is not to publish every aspect of my life or manufacture opinions to seem more active online; my aim is much simpler: engage with things that interest me, think critically about them, work through them, and publish my thoughts and/or work given the evidence.

Practically speaking, if I am researching something that I am genuinely interested in, I want to write about it. If I build something that optimises my workflow or could optimise the workflow of others, I want to publish it. If I develop or change my opinions, I want to document the thought process and evidence which led me to such conclusions.

To a large extent, this website is exactly that.

Unobservable competence is useless.