The fifth untaught skill, and the first one that isn’t about your own judgment at all. It’s about what you’ll absorb on behalf of someone else. In a workplace where software has made blame precise, instant, and free, the rarest thing a human can do is stand between that precision and the people it would otherwise grind down.… Read the rest “Eating the Loss”
The fourth untaught skill. The one that comes after you learn to see clearly, learn to commit, and learn to be wrong well. It’s about knowing which decisions a human must keep their hands on now that the machine wants to make them for you — and it may be the last skill left that’s genuinely worth paying a person for.… Read the rest “I Almost Let a Model Make a $3M Call — The Untaught Skill That Stopped Me”
… Read the rest “The Conviction Gap: The Career Skill AI Cannot Replace (And Most Professionals Don’t Have)”Quick read: Most mid-career professionals plateau at the same spot — somewhere between senior individual contributor and director. They produce great analysis, structure problems beautifully, and write competent memos. But they never quite cross into leadership. This piece is about what’s actually going on, why it’s getting worse in the AI era, and the three habits that close the Conviction Gap.
This is the core principle of via negativa — and it may be the most powerful mental model for focus and productivity that most people have never applied.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was forty days from bankruptcy.… Read the rest “Via Negativa: The Ancient Mental Model That Cures Modern Distraction”
A companion piece to I Got Replaced by ChatGPT — Then Rehired at Triple the Rate
Experience compounds or decays. The difference isn’t the years — it’s whether you know exactly what you’ve built.
The worst professional mistake I’ve made wasn’t a bad decision. It was describing myself wrong for a decade.… Read the rest “The Human Premium: A Career Audit for Professionals with 10–25 Years of Experience”
