Tag: deep work

What does AI make rare and valuable?

MIKE1 Comment

Cal Newport asks is: What skills are rare and valuable? The answer leads to a whole book of career and life advice.

Our neck of the woods has a lot of bike riders. There’s a large retirement community, with many people who have or get, new hobbies. Pickleball, water volleyball, and golf are the three largest, but we see plenty of riders.

And many of them are e-bikes.

Purists (in the jtbd world this is supply side innovation) scoff. They might even mumble: ‘that’s not real bike riding’. But e-bikes changed how people cycle. We used to see many tandem riders, almost always couples who wanted to ‘ride together’ but didn’t ride at the same speed.

Now we see almost none.

Similarly, a friend said that a guy from his group got an e-bike. At first, like friends do, they gave him a hard time. But the bike lets the guy stay with the group. Rather than aging out, and into another group, the e-bike lets him stay with the pack.

In what ways will AI/LLM change work? Will we see people ‘ride together’? Will workers be older or will the adoption curve be steep and young people’s skills accelerate?

No one knows, much like no one predicted the e-bike adoption.

But, work will come back to Newport’s question: What is rare and valuable?

Note: I tried to run an outline through a LLM to create a blog post. None of the versions were the desired voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

First principles: story

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Imagine a young Ben Folds. He’s walking to piano lessons. He loves the piano but not this particular teacher. It’s snowing. And windy.

There’s a bicycle track through the snow. It’s all Folds sees. It’s snowing and windy.

He sees the track and imagines what happened. The track changes direction, the story changes too. Folds writes:

“I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve.”

There’s a dichotomy between deep work (Newport) and Against Waldenponding (Rao). We balance on this tightrope each day. Some days more on one end, other days at the other, and some we troop between the two.

Newport wants people to learn first principles, to study things which change slowly. Rao wants people to fit first principles into the world in interesting ways, to prototype, to gather rough consensus and run code. 

Stories are a first principle idea to consider. We run on stories and one way to get better at telling them is through boredom. Folds again:

Related: The 3 Ways to Spend Your Day.