TLDR:
Opportunities are emergence, the entrepreneur is the catalyst, emergence literacy is the core skill

As an entrepreneur should you be in the new industry or the old industry and make it better?

The answer maps onto the concept of emergence.

Every opportunity is a gap between the current order and the next order

Searching, exploring opportunities is therefore about understanding the nature of and playing a part in emergence.

What is emergence?

Emergence is the idea that something new and unexpected arises from simpler parts coming together - and the new thing has properties that none of the individual parts have on their own.

Emergence is a result of how structures form and reform over time under the tension between entropy and order.

Entropy and order are the two poles.

Their tension is permanent and generative.

Emergence is the process by which that tension produces new complexity.

Entrepreneurship is the human practice of reading that process and catalyzing it at the right moment.

And the opportunity — always — is in the tension between the dissolving old order and the assembling new one.

For example:

• Swarms of birds

• Weather systems

• Life from neurons

• Crowds at football games

• AI

• Galaxies and planets from gases

• Cities

• Money

Human beings ourselves are created as a result of emergence of the universe.
Companies, cities, money, and then AI are a result of emergence from us.

The fundamental nature of emergence

Emergence happens when components interact and produce something that none of the components contain individually. The key word is interact- emergence is always relational. It’s never in the thing itself, it’s in the between.

Emergence is happening all the time

We’re often advised to be on the cutting edge.

But it’s more than being on the frontier, because emergence doesn’t always, and actually rarely happens on the absolute frontier.

The question is - what’s emerging?

How do you identify emergence?

• Anomalies that don't fit the existing model

• Workarounds becoming mainstream

• Tension without resolution - It's like pressure building in a fault line.

• Edge customers behaving differently

The meta-skill underneath all of this: You have to be genuinely curious rather than confirmatory. Most people look at markets to confirm what they already believe. Emergence-spotting requires looking for what contradicts your current model — which is psychologically uncomfortable.

Emergence Literacy

If all opportunity is emergence-related, then the most valuable skill an entrepreneur can have isn’t execution, or fundraising, or even product sense - though all those matter.

It’s emergence literacy - the ability to read where systems are under tension, spot the anomalies assembling, and position before the threshold crosses.

Some ideas

Adult education and reskilling

The college model is visibly straining. But the alternative infrastructure for serious adult skill-building - not just courses, but credentialing, community, career pathways - barely exists. The need is enormous and growing.

How does emergence work?

The patterns of how it happens

Accumulation reaches a threshold Small changes stack up invisibly until a tipping point. Nothing seems to be happening, then everything changes at once. The change looks sudden but was actually slow. This is why mature markets surprise people — the accumulation was happening the whole time beneath the surface.

Constraints force recombination When a system can’t grow in its existing form, pressure builds until components recombine in a new configuration. Necessity genuinely does mother invention. The tighter the constraint, the more creative the emergence.

Two previously separate systems touch When things that were evolving independently suddenly intersect, the interaction produces something neither contained. AI meeting biology. Finance meeting mobile. Energy meeting software. The collision itself is generative.

A critical mass of behavior shifts Emergence in markets often follows when enough individual behaviors change that a new collective pattern becomes self-sustaining. Below the threshold it looks like a fad. Above it, it’s a new normal.

Infrastructure gets built for one thing and enables another The internet was built for defense and academia. The infrastructure enabled commerce, social connection, media. Emergence often rides on infrastructure built for a different purpose.

The Phase Transition

Think of water. If you heat water from 10°C to 99°C, it stays a liquid. It gets hotter, but the properties don’t change. This is the “tension building” and “accumulation reaching a threshold” phase. Then, at 100°C, a tiny 1-degree shift causes a total phase transition into steam - a completely different state of matter with entirely new properties.

In business, people think markets change linearly (getting slightly hotter). In reality, they stay seemingly the same until they hit 100°C and experience a total phase change.

The Entrepreneur’s Job - the Catalyst

The founders job is not How do I force my will on the market? but Where is the system already bursting at the seams, and how can I build the bridge to the new baseline?

The nature underneath all these patterns

A few deeper principles:

• Emergence requires diversity - homogeneous systems are stable but sterile. Variation is the raw material emergence works with

• Emergence requires connectivity - components have to be able to interact. Isolated things don’t produce emergence

• Emergence is irreversible - once a genuinely new order assembles, you can’t go back to the previous state. The system has a new baseline

• Emergence is unpredictable in specifics but not in conditions - you can’t predict exactly what will emerge, but you can identify where conditions are ripe

The meta-pattern Every instance of emergence follows roughly the same arc:

Tension builds → anomalies appear → early adopters recombine components in a new way → threshold crossed → new order becomes self-sustaining → looks obvious in retrospect

How to benefit from emergence?

1. You make serious money from emergence by seeing the new order before it's priced in.

2. The insight: emergence needs picks and shovels. The specific winners are unpredictable. The infrastructure they’ll all need is more predictable.

3. Acquire underpriced assets in the tension zone

4. Be the recombiner

5. Aggregate the fragmented

6. Own the network that the new order runs on

An example of this is how we often feel we have to struggle against the world.

Even our economics is built on an assumption of scarcity.

Humans is what the universe has created as a result of emergence.

Emergence is the idea that something new and unexpected arises from simpler parts coming together - and the new thing has properties that none of the individual parts have on their own.

Carl Sagan said that minds is what the universe creates so it can experience itself.

So we are very much a part of are a result of the universe rather than separate from it.

We are made from stars, we are stars, and we are not separate from them.

This gives us a sense that instead of being humans we are universe beings.

If you are not separate from the universe but an expression of it - then the universe isn’t something you’re struggling against. It’s something moving through you.

You are built from the universe.

The scarcity, the competition, the grinding effort - those are stories built on a mistaken premise.

Helps us to think bigger than ourselves.

AI is another example of emergence and abundance.

There are huge opportunities and abundance everywhere and it is growing and improving..

You don’t need to force it.

• Have fun!

• Have Faith

• Surround yourself with the right people

The reality underneath is abundance. Connection. A vast, creative force that has been producing novelty and complexity for 13 billion years, and hasn’t stopped.

You are part of that.

Einstein used to say that time was an illusion.

Einstein used to think that we live in a box universe. The past present and future all exist at once, we are just experiencing it like we’re watching a movie.

Is free will an illusion? In some way it doesn’t matter.

Free will could be a combination of determinism, random, and choices we can make.

The process of reasoning, reflecting, imagining alternatives and choosing based on values - that’s real, even if it’s part of a larger causal story.

Another theory is that we were created to be more aware of the present, because that’s what we can control and affect.

What are your thoughts on that?

Go deep in one thing.

Stay broad across everything else.

Be the person who can do the work and talk to everyone in the room. Google wanted you. McKinsey wanted you.

Every LinkedIn thought leader told you this was the answer.

Previously I discussed the different frameworks the different shapes and how to progress.

Today I’m going to introduce more about the shift - and why it matters.

What the T-Shape Was Built For

The T-shaped person made perfect sense for the 2010s.

Organisations were becoming more cross-functional. Products required design, engineering, and marketing to actually talk to each other. The specialist who couldn’t collaborate was becoming a liability. The generalist who couldn’t go deep was useless. The T was the elegant solution - depth plus breadth, expert plus communicator.

It worked.

The problem is that the T-shape was built for a world that no longer exists. It was designed for an economy where the horizontal stroke - broad general knowledge, synthesis across disciplines, communication between teams - was rare and valuable.

That world ended the day large language models became widely available.

AI Killed the Horizontal Stroke

Everything the T-shape’s horizontal stroke does, AI does better, faster, and for almost nothing.

The horizontal stroke of the T — the thing that made you more valuable than the pure specialist - has been commoditised. Not partially. Not in some areas. Comprehensively, across almost every knowledge domain, at a speed that has left most organisations and career advisors completely flat-footed.

And the vertical stroke isn’t safe either. The bar for genuine expertise keeps rising. What counted as deep knowledge five years ago is now a prompt away. AI goes deep before it goes wide - the first wave of disruption is hitting exactly the specialised tasks that I and T people are paid for. Document review. Financial modelling. Code generation. Diagnostic reasoning.

So the T-shape is being squeezed from both ends simultaneously.

The horizontal commoditised by AI. The vertical under relentless upward pressure.

This is not a minor adjustment. It is a structural collapse of the dominant career model of the last decade.

Why X-Shaped Is the Answer

The X-shaped person is not simply a better T.

It is something qualitatively different.

Where the T person has depth in one area and breadth across many, the X person sits at the intersection of multiple genuine areas of depth -and generates something from that intersection that could not exist anywhere else.

Not synthesis. Creation.

Not combining what others know. Producing what only they can see.

Darwin was a naturalist, geologist, and economist of ideas simultaneously. Charlie Munger built one of the greatest investment records in history by constructing a latticework of mental models across physics, biology, psychology, and economics — not by knowing more finance than everyone else. Steve Jobs was a technologist who understood human desire better than most psychologists. None of them were T-shaped. All of them were X-shaped.

The X person’s value is not in what they know. It is in where they stand. The specific, unrepeatable intersection of domains, experiences, and perspectives that is uniquely theirs -and that no AI can replicate, because no AI has lived their particular life or made their particular bets.

AI cannot replicate the specific intersection that is you.

Your unique experiences, combined with. your unique knowledge and people skills and relationships.

The Honest Difficulty

Becoming X-shaped is not a weekend project. It requires building genuine depth in a second domain when your first one is already paying well and every institution around you is telling you to go deeper into what you already know. It requires years of discomfort in a new field before it starts to compound. It requires resisting the credential system, which has no category for you, and the job title system, which has no box for what you’re building.

Many people won’t do it.

That is precisely why it’s valuable.

The T-shape was always achievable with a few years of deliberate effort.

The X-shape requires a different mindset, it takes longer, and requires a level of intellectual courage that most career frameworks don’t even acknowledge as a variable.

The courage to be You.

To stand out from everyone else.

And say what only you can say.

And if you can do it you can build a monopoly of one.

A long term competitive advantage that nobody or AI can replicate.

What to Do With This

If you’re T-shaped right now, you may not in immediate danger.

But you are building on a foundation that is actively eroding.

The question worth sitting with is not how to defend the T.

It’s what your X-shape looks like.

What is the second domain you could go genuinely deep in - not surface familiarity, not a few books, but real hard-won expertise?

What intersection does that create with what you already know? What could you see from that position that nobody else can?

That intersection is your career strategy for the next decade. Not the horizontal stroke. Not the depth alone.

The place where only you can stand.

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You can read more about the different shapes and how to progress here

Here’s another article where I go into more detail about how to build a successful career in the AI age

Most career advice traditionally told you to find your passion, work hard, and specialise.

Get really good at one thing.

Become the expert.

Build your reputation around a single, legible skill.

That advice made sense for the twentieth century.

It worked for your parents.

It is catastrophic for this one.

The question that will define careers over the next decade isn’t what you know. It’s the shape of what you know. And most people have never been asked to think about it that way.

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The I Person

The I person is the specialist. Deep expertise in one domain, limited breadth beyond it. The accountant who only knows accounting. The developer who only knows code. The lawyer who only knows law.

For most of the twentieth century, this was the winning strategy. Institutions were stable, industries moved slowly, and depth was rewarded because it was rare and hard to acquire. You spent ten years becoming genuinely expert at something and the market paid you accordingly for decades.

The I person still exists and still has value. But they face one brutal, existential risk: AI goes deep before it goes wide.

The first wave of AI disruption is hitting exactly the tasks that I people are paid for. Document review. Code generation. Financial modelling. Diagnostic pattern recognition. The vertical stroke of the I - the thing that made it valuable - is precisely what large language models are being trained to replicate.

Being an I person in 2026 is not a death sentence. But it is a single point of failure. And single points of failure are dangerous in a world changing this fast.

The T Person

The T person was the answer the 2010s gave to the limitations of the I. Coined by IDEO’s Tim Brown and popularised across Silicon Valley and consulting, the T shape describes someone with genuine depth in one area and real breadth across several adjacent ones.

The product manager who understands engineering, design, research, and business without mastering any of them. The marketer who can write, analyse data, brief a developer, and present to a board. Google loved this person. McKinsey loved this person. Every progressive HR department spent a decade trying to hire this person.

And the T shape is better than the I. The horizontal stroke creates empathy across disciplines, makes collaboration easier, and means you’re not entirely helpless when your primary domain shifts.

But the T shape has a problem that is becoming impossible to ignore.

The horizontal stroke - broad general competence across multiple domains, synthesising information, communicating across disciplines - is exactly what AI does effortlessly. The very capability that made the T person valuable over the I person is the one AI has most thoroughly commoditised.

And the vertical stroke faces the same pressure it always did. The bar for genuine expertise keeps rising. What counted as deep knowledge five years ago is now a prompt away.

The T person is not obsolete. But they are being squeezed from both directions simultaneously. That is an uncomfortable place to build a career.

The M Person

The M shape is where things get interesting - and rare.

The M person has two or three real areas of depth, connected by breadth. Not surface familiarity. Not “I’ve read a few books about it.” Actual hard-won expertise in multiple domains, with the knowledge to move fluidly between them.

The economist who is also a serious technologist. The doctor who genuinely understands data science. The educator who has built and run businesses. The writer who has deep expertise in psychology, economics, and geopolitics and can pull live threads between all three in ways neither specialist could alone.

What makes the M person valuable isn’t just the depth of each vertical. It’s the space between them. The insights that emerge from genuinely knowing two things deeply - and being able to see how they illuminate each other - are insights that neither specialist alone could produce. And they are insights that AI, which has broad knowledge but no genuine integrated understanding, consistently fails to generate unprompted.

The M shape is also harder to acquire than it looks. Our education system is built to produce I people and occasionally T people. Becoming genuinely expert in two or three distinct domains requires going against almost every institutional incentive — the pressure to specialise, to credential, to stay in your lane.

But that difficulty is precisely what makes it valuable. The things that are hard to acquire and hard to replicate are the things the market will eventually pay most for.

The X Person

The X person is the rarest shape of all- and the one the AI age will reward most.

The X isn’t simply more depth or more breadth than the M. It is something qualitatively different.

The X person doesn’t just operate across multiple domains - they sit at the intersection of them and generate entirely new ideas, frameworks, and categories from that position.

Where the M person synthesises, the X person creates. Where the M person can see across disciplines, the X person builds new ones. They are not combining existing knowledge- they are producing something that could not have existed without the specific, unrepeatable collision of everything they are.

Think of the people who have genuinely moved the world in the last century. They were almost never pure specialists. Darwin was a naturalist, geologist, and economist of ideas simultaneously. Charlie Munger built one of the greatest investment records in history not by knowing more about finance than everyone else, but by constructing what he called a “latticework of mental models” across physics, biology, psychology, and economics. Steve Jobs was a technologist and designer who understood human desire better than most psychologists. None of them could be reduced to a single shape.

Here is the crucial insight:

The combination of your experiences, domains, perspective, and way of connecting ideas is genuinely unique. It has never existed before and will never exist again. That intersection - properly developed and deliberately built - is the most defensible position available in an AI economy.

The Progression Is Not Automatic

Reading this, it’s tempting to assume the journey from I to T to M to X is natural - that you simply accumulate knowledge and eventually arrive somewhere interesting.

It isn’t. Most people get stuck.

They go deep on one thing, add some surface breadth, call themselves T-shaped, and stop there - because the institutions around them stop rewarding further development. The credential system doesn’t recognise M people. Job titles don’t exist for X people. LinkedIn has no box for “person who generates new frameworks by colliding expertise in economics, technology, and human development.”

The progression from I to X requires a deliberate choice to keep going when the incentives say stop. To invest in a second genuine area of depth when your first one is already paying well. To resist the pressure to specialise further when every institution around you is pushing you back into your lane.

And it requires pain, sacrificing the good for the great.

It also requires real time. Not the compressed pseudo-learning of a weekend course or an AI summary. You cannot fake the M shape. The depth has to be genuine. And genuine depth takes years of discomfort, confusion, and slow accumulation before it compounds into something nobody else has.

So, which Shape Are You Building?

Most people reading this are I or T shaped and know it. Some are M shaped and haven’t named it yet. Almost nobody is X shaped - but more people are closer than they think.

The question worth sitting with is not which shape you are today. It’s which shape you are deliberately building toward.

Because the AI age is not going to wait. It is already restructuring the value of every skill, every credential, every career path. The I people most exposed to automation are discovering that right now. The T people being squeezed from both directions are beginning to feel it.

The M and X people - those who have built depth across multiple domains and learned to generate value at the intersections - are the ones who will look back on this period not as a disruption but as the moment the field finally cleared.

The question is which side of that clearing you want to be on

________________________

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an I-shaped person? Someone with deep expertise in one domain and limited breadth beyond it. The traditional specialist.

What is a T-shaped person? Someone with deep expertise in one area and broad general knowledge across adjacent disciplines. The dominant career model of the 2010s.

What is an M-shaped person? Someone with genuine depth in two or three distinct domains, connected by breadth. Rarer and increasingly more valuable than T-shaped in an AI economy.

What is an X-shaped person? Someone who sits at the intersection of multiple domains and generates entirely new ideas, frameworks, and categories from that position. The most defensible career shape in the AI age.

Which skill shape is best for the AI age? The M and X shapes are most resilient to AI disruption because they generate value at intersections that AI cannot replicate — the combination of depth across multiple domains produces insights neither specialist nor AI can produce alone.

Is the T-shaped person still relevant? Increasingly less so. The horizontal stroke of the T - broad general competence - is precisely what AI replicates most easily, while the vertical stroke faces rising bars for genuine expertise.

What is the difference between a T-shaped and an M-shaped professional?
A T-shaped professional has deep expertise in one single area and broad, conversational knowledge across adjacent fields. An M-shaped professional possesses genuine, hard-won depth in two or three distinct domains, allowing them to fluidly transition and find unique insights at the intersections of those fields.

Why is AI a threat to T-shaped skills?
The horizontal stroke of the T-shape represents broad general competence, synthesis, and communication across disciplines—which happens to be exactly what Large Language Models (LLMs) do effortlessly and cheaply. Therefore, the generalist capabilities of the T-shape are being rapidly commoditized by AI.

What is an X-shaped creator?
An X-shaped individual sits at the unique intersection of multiple deep domains to generate entirely new frameworks, ideas, and categories. While AI can replicate depth (the specialist) and breadth (the generalist), it cannot replicate the highly specific, unrepeatable collision of experiences, perspectives, and skills that define an X-shaped creator.

How do I transition from a specialist (I-shape) to an X-shape?
The transition requires a deliberate choice to resist hyper-specialization. You must commit the time and cognitive effort to build a second and third area of genuine depth (becoming M-shaped), and then actively apply your unique personal perspective to experiment, create, and build at the intersections of those domains.

That’s because they’re diagnosing the wrong disease.

If birth rates are falling everywhere globally - even in countries with vastly different policies, it can’t be policy related it must be something that is common across all cultures.

That something is the economic consumption model itself - and we may be watching it eat its own tail.

We Built an Economy That Consumes Its Own Future

Modern economics runs on a simple engine: produce things, sell them to consumers, grow. But there’s a flaw baked into this model that has been compounding quietly for fifty years.

Consumption growth requires one of two things: either consumers have more money to spend, or you find ways to extract more from the money they already have. For most of the late twentieth century, rising wages handled the first. When wages stagnated, the economy switched to the second - financialisation, credit expansion, asset inflation, the relentless expansion of costs in housing, education, and healthcare.

The result is that the average person in a developed economy is spending a larger share of their income on the basics of existence than any previous generation. Housing. Debt repayment. Education loans. The essentials have been quietly repriced upward while wages have not kept pace.

This is not a policy failure. It is the logical endpoint of a growth model that treats consumer spending as the engine while treating consumers themselves as the fuel.

And children are the most expensive consumer decision a person can make.

The Consumer Surplus Problem

Consumer surplus is the gap between what something is worth to you and what you actually pay for it. It is, in a real sense, the breathing room of economic life - the margin that makes you feel like the economy is working for you rather than simply extracting from you.

Consumption-driven growth has been systematically eroding that surplus for decades. Every time housing costs rise faster than wages, consumer surplus shrinks. Every time a subscription replaces a one-off purchase, surplus shrinks. Every time a credential that used to cost two years now costs five, surplus shrinks.

When surplus collapses, people make different calculations. They delay. They reduce. They optimise. Having children is the opposite of optimising - it is the most gloriously inefficient, surplus-destroying decision a human being can make. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.

So in an economy that has trained people to think like consumers first and has simultaneously stripped away their financial slack, fewer people make that decision. Not because they don’t want children. But because the felt conditions for it- the sense that there is enough, that the future is expansive rather than constrained -have been steadily consumed by the model itself.

GDP Doesn’t Measure What’s Being Lost

Here’s the trap that makes this so hard to escape: the consumption model keeps producing GDP growth even as it destroys the conditions for human flourishing.

Rising house prices add to wealth figures. Growing debt adds to financial sector output. The expansion of paid services to replace things families and communities once did for free - childcare, elderly care, cooking, cleaning — all of this registers as growth.

But what’s actually happening is a substitution. Things that were once produced within households and communities, outside the market, are being pulled into the market and monetised. GDP goes up. Consumer surplus goes down. The household balance sheet gets thinner. And the decision to have children - which requires exactly the kind of slack, security, and felt abundance that the model has been quietly consuming - becomes harder to make.

We are not suffering from a birth rate problem. We are suffering from a consumer surplus problem that is expressing itself as a birth rate problem.

The Housing Trap

Nothing illustrates this more concretely than housing. In previous generations, the path was legible: get a job, rent cheaply, save, buy, settle, start a family. That sequence has broken down almost everywhere that consumption-led growth has fully taken hold.

Housing has been transformed from shelter into an asset class. When that happens, rising prices are no longer a problem to solve - they are a feature of the model. They generate wealth for existing owners, collateral for banks, and returns for investors. So nobody with power fixes it, because for them, it isn’t broken.

But for the person in their late twenties trying to save a deposit while paying rent that consumes 40% of their income, it is very broken indeed. The years being consumed by that trap are precisely the years biology intended for family formation. And the cruelest part is that it’s not felt as a political failure - it’s felt as a personal one. As if you simply haven’t worked hard enough yet to deserve the life your parents had at your age.

A home also isn’t just shelter psychologically. It is the felt precondition for permanence. For rootedness. You don’t plant a family in soil you might be evicted from in six months. Housing insecurity creates a specific, low-level existential anxiety about the future - and people don’t make 20-year bets on a future that feels that fragile.

The GDP Trap

The housing trap is a symptom of the wider GDP that trap runs deeper still, because it is a problem of measurement - and therefore of values.

GDP counts what is transacted. It does not count what is lost. It does not count the hours a parent spends raising a child, the care a family member provides to an elderly relative, the social fabric woven by communities that stay in one place long enough to know each other. None of that registers. It is economically invisible.

What GDP does count is when those things get replaced by paid services. When the family that used to raise children together fractures under labour market pressure and childcare gets outsourced, GDP goes up. When elderly care moves from family to facility, GDP goes up. The market has expanded. The national accounts look healthier. And something irreplaceable has been quietly consumed.

This creates a political trap that is almost impossible to escape. Every intervention that makes family life more viable - genuinely affordable housing, wages that track productivity, reduced working hours - looks like a cost to the model. Every intervention that extracts more from consumers while substituting market services for household ones looks like growth. So governments keep choosing growth, and the birth rate keeps telling them what that choice actually costs.

The Next Step

Every growth model has a natural limit. The consumption model’s limit is the consumer.

We currently have these contradictions in our economic model and have reached the limit.

When you extract enough from wages through housing costs, debt, inflation in essential services and credential requirements, you eventually reach a point where the consumer cannot consume their way to the life the model promises. The house, the family, the comfortable retirement - these were the implicit contract. The economy would grow, and in return, ordinary life would be affordable and expansive.

That contract is breaking down. And the birth rate is one of the most honest signals we have that it’s breaking down - because the decision to have a child is ultimately a bet on the future. It says: I believe there will be enough. I believe the world my child enters will be navigable.

Fewer people are making that bet. Not because they’ve become selfish or individualistic or obsessed with travel and avocados, as the commentary class likes to suggest.

But because the model has consumed enough of their surplus that the future no longer feels like a safe place to invest in.

Until we build an economic model that genuinely returns surplus to people - through affordable housing, reduced credential inflation, wages that actually track productivity - the birth rate will keep telling us the same thing.

The engine is eating itself. And the falling birth rate is the warning light.

But the thing is, the current model is kind of working, we’re growing, and so it will take either a crisis, or a competitor with a better model, to replace the current one. When everyone is taking massive loans and in debt, a new better more prudent model can’t compete.

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Here’s an article which explores the concepts in more detail with practical examples.

That’s why you might not expect me to say this.

This isn’t anti-education. It’s a sober look at where credibility, income, and opportunity are actually moving- and what that means for anyone making decisions about their future right now.

The Changing Nature of Degrees

For most of the 20th century, a degree was the only ticket into the room. It signalled intelligence, discipline, and social proof to employers who had no other way to evaluate you. It worked because there was no other signal.

That monopoly is breaking down fast.

Employers increasingly care about what you can do, not what certificate you hold, and they even find it hard to verify your certificate is real.

AI is compressing the time it takes to learn almost any skill. And platforms like YouTube have created something the degree never could: a live, public, monetisable record of your thinking, your communication, and your ability to build an audience.

What is a Degree Worth?

A degree still has real value - but it’s worth being honest about what that value actually is.

The best thing about university isn’t the curriculum. It’s the people and the experience. The friendships, the networks, the exposure to smart, ambitious peers who will go on to do interesting things. That’s real and it compounds over decades.

Beyond that? The signal is weakening. More and more of the education is happening by students by themslves online with AI accoding to the curriculum.

And as more and more students graduate with the same credentials, hiring managers are increasingly looking past the qualification to the portfolio, the project, the proof of excellence, the proof of agency, and something that differentiates you.

What is a Youtube Channel Worth?

More than most people think - and in ways that go well beyond ad revenue.

Let’s start with the money.

If you build a channel to 10 million views, you can expect to earn around $27,000 USD in ad revenue depending on your niche. That’s not life-changing on its own, but it’s tuition money.

It’s runway. And it scales - unlike a part-time job, a video keeps earning after you stop working on it. It makes money while you sleep.

But the financial upside is actually not the most interesting part.

Building a YouTube channel teaches you a set of skills that are extraordinarily hard to learn anywhere else:

• Communication - You learn to explain ideas clearly, hold attention, and make complex things simple. This is one of the most valuable skills for the future.
  

• Distribution - You learn how platforms work, how audiences grow, and how content spreads. This is what most businesses desperately need and struggle to find.

• People - By learning about distribution, you are also learning about people, what they think, why they like your video, what their needs are, and how to satisfy them.

• Presentation - You get comfortable on camera, in front of an audience, under pressure. Most people never develop this.

• Market Dynamics - You realise that when you do something really excellent, that is the best in the field, you get outsize results. That being the best in a specific niche, and being different, is far more valuable than being the same as others. You learn about the niches and the market.

• It Teaches You Grit and To Learn from Failure

• It teaches you how to learn

• Self Improvement - You publish, you get feedback in the form of real data instantly, you improve. This is the same loop that builds great products and great companies, and by building new products you are improving yourself immediately, daily, you don’t need to wait for your homework to be returned or your exam results.

• Proof of Work - Every video is a timestamped, public record of what you know and how well you can communicate it. No CV needed.

That last point matters enormously. In a world flooded with credentials, a body of work that anyone can watch is one of the most powerful things you can have. You can just send your video to an employer, or you can even start your own business up.

The Real Shift: Proof of Work Over Proof of Study

We are moving from a world that rewards time to one that rewards results.

A degree says: “I completed a programme and dedicated time and effort” A YouTube channel says: “Here is evidence of what I can actually do, at scale, in public, over time and these are my results.” One of those is increasingly verifiable. The other increasingly is hard to verify and can’t be applied.

This doesn’t mean degrees are useless. Medicine, law, engineering - there are fields where the qualification is the point, and rightly so. But for anyone going into business, media, tech, marketing, entrepreneurship, or any creative field, the calculus is shifting.

Why You Should Do Both

Here’s the thing: this isn’t either/or.

The smartest move is to treat your YouTube channel as a business you build alongside your education - not instead of it.

Use university for the network, the structured thinking, and the experiences that only come from being around other ambitious people in person.

Use YouTube to build leverage, income, and a public record of your capabilities at the same time.

Publish your work and your points of views online.

By the time you graduate, you won’t just have a degree.

You’ll have an audience, a portfolio, transferable skills, and potentially a revenue stream. That combination is nearly impossible to compete with.

The question isn’t just whether to go to university.

The question is: what are you building while you’re there?

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If you found this useful, consider sharing it with someone who’s trying to decide what to do with their future.

And if you want to explore more ideas like this, the Superhuman Curriculum is where I write about how to thrive in the Intelligence Age.

Including myself, until I was 38, I just thought it was normal. Realising and overcoming this, was a massive unlock of my energy levels and a huge unlock of my growth. It solved my personal relationships and work relationships at the same time, freed me up a huge amount of energy and allowed me to focus at a much bigger level. I was no longer too involved in the details of what was something someone else should take care of.

If you think you might be experiencing this, I’ll share more about it and how to identify if you have it, and how to overcome it.

Let’s start with the definitions.

DEFINITIONS

Enmeshment is when the boundaries between people - usually in families or close relationships - become so blurred that individuals lose their sense of separate identity. People in enmeshed relationships are overly involved in each other's emotions, decisions, and lives to the point where it's hard to tell where one person ends and another begins. For example, a parent who can't let their child make any independent decisions, or feels their child's emotions as if they were their own.

To people who are enmeshed, it feels totally normal. You might not know you are enmeshed until you identify it.

It seems extreme, but many people have it to a certain level. I’ll share more below after defining the terms.

Differentiation is the ability to stay fully yourself - with your own thoughts, feelings, and values - while remaining emotionally connected to others.

A well-differentiated person can:

• Be close to someone without losing themselves in the relationship

• Disagree with people they love without feeling like the relationship is falling apart

• Manage their own emotions without needing others to regulate them

• Let others have their own feelings without taking responsibility for fixing them

It’s basically the healthy middle ground between two unhealthy extremes:

Too little differentiation → Enmeshment You merge with others, lose your identity, can’t separate your feelings from theirs.

Too much differentiation → Emotional cutoff You wall yourself off completely, avoid intimacy, become emotionally isolated.

Boundaries are the limits a person sets around what they’re comfortable with - emotionally, physically, or in terms of time and energy. They define what’s okay and what’s not okay in how others treat you or engage with you. Healthy boundaries let you stay connected to others while still maintaining your own identity, needs, and wellbeing.

The Problem

Many people have enmeshment because they were brought up in a family where enmeshment happened either between the parents or otherwise. This is usually just the way things have been, and were passed down from generations above. It’s surprisingly common.

There is also a difference between cultures. Asian families tend to have a closer family structure and less differentiation which might seem like enmeshment in the West but considered healthy in Asia. It’s on a continuum and it’s subjective.

It results in a massive cost of energy and limitation and by overcoming enmeshment you can become much more free to grow and improve.

How to Know If You Are Enmeshed?

In your relationships with family/partners

• You feel responsible for other people’s emotions — if they’re upset, it’s somehow your job to fix it

• You feel guilty for having needs, opinions, or a life that differs from theirs

• You struggle to make decisions without checking with someone first

• Their mood dictates your mood — if they’re anxious, you become anxious

• Saying no feels dangerous, like it will break the relationship

• You over-explain or justify yourself constantly

In your sense of self

• You’re not sure what you actually want, separate from what others want for you

• Your self-worth depends heavily on whether others are pleased with you

• You find it hard to be alone — solitude feels uncomfortable or even threatening

• You don’t really know your own values, preferences, or opinions independently

The clearest internal signal

Ask yourself: “Can I disappoint someone I love and still feel okay?”

If the answer is no - or even a very uncomfortable yes - that’s worth paying attention to.

The tricky part is that enmeshment often feels like love. Closeness, loyalty, caring deeply. It takes some reflection to see where connection ends and loss of self begins.

The Importance of Space in Relationships

In relationships having separation and space to be your individual person is essential. If you can be a better version of you, you have more to give the other.

This isn’t about enmeshment but a foundational concept of relationships that we often forget. You often solve problems indirectly, by focusing on something else.

The Solution

Boundaries are essential because otherwise things bleed into each other. You are not able to operate efficiently. The reason your body has separate organs is because they perform tasks better by themselves. If your brain and your heart were one organ, it becomes messy and can’t operate well.

How to Overcome This?

1. Diagnosing it is the first step

2. For me - I just watched a load of Youtube videos about this to understand it https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=enmeshment

3. You will gradually adapt your relationships by setting boundaries, stating what you want, and putting your needs first, without worrying about others. To your old self it seems not as nice. You have to overcome that barrier, but it’s actually just normal, and in the end you’ll unlock a massive level of productivity.

In more details

1. Awareness first

You can’t change what you can’t see. Just noticing — “oh, I’m taking responsibility for their feelings again” or “I just changed my opinion because they seemed uncomfortable” — is genuinely the first step. Don’t underestimate it.

2. Get to know yourself

This sounds simple but for enmeshed people it’s actually unfamiliar work.

• What do you enjoy, separate from others?

• What are your values?

• What do you actually think — before you check what others think?

Journaling, therapy, or just spending time alone can surface a self that’s been quiet for a long time.

3. Tolerate the discomfort of differentness

Start small. Have a different opinion and don’t backtrack. Make a decision without asking for permission. Let someone be upset without rushing to fix it.

It will feel awful at first — guilt, anxiety, fear of abandonment. That feeling is not a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s just your nervous system reacting to something unfamiliar.

4. Build boundaries gradually

Not as walls, but as honest expressions of where you are.

• “I love you and I’m not able to do that”

• “I see it differently”

• “That’s yours to deal with, not mine”

Expect pushback. Enmeshed systems don’t let people leave easily. Guilt trips, anger, or the silent treatment are common responses — not because you’ve done something wrong, but because you’ve disrupted the pattern.

5. Grieve what you didn’t have

This is underrated. Part of the process is realising that what felt like closeness was sometimes control, and that you didn’t get to fully be yourself for a long time. That’s a real loss and it deserves acknowledgment.

Share Your Experiences

Are you going through this experience? I’m curious to learn more about it.

Here are a few ideas.

In the Industrial Age, work was often a transaction: you traded hours for a paycheck, effectively selling segments of your life to buy back the rest of it later.

But in the Intelligence Age, this model is a Low-Leverage that means trading yourself to become a Passive NPC.

To become a Superhuman, work must be redefined.

It isn’t just what you do to survive; it is the primary engine of your evolution.

It is the laboratory where theory meets reality, and where your superhuman self are actually forged.

Here is how work functions as the backbone of the Superhuman Curriculum.

1. The Forge: How Work Builds the Self

We often think we “do” work, but work also “does” us.

Every project, deadline, and bottleneck is a weight in the gym of your character.

• Skill Bootloading: Work provides the high-stakes environment necessary for Superlearning. You don’t learn “leverage” by reading about it; you learn it when you have to scale a process or automate a task to save your own time.

• Refining the Core: Work tests your Focus and Energy. It reveals where your willpower is thin and where your internal narrative - your Identity - is holding you back.

• The Feedback Mirror: Real-world results are the only honest mirrors. They tell you exactly where your “Internal Alignment” is off. If you find yourself procrastinating, it’s rarely a lack of discipline; it’s a signal that your work and your genuine curiosity have drifted apart.

2. The Lens: Learning How the World Actually Works

The world is a market, and those who don’t participate it are left in an ivory tower - world of theory and ideals.

Academic study gives you a map and ideas; work gives you the real understanding of the “puck” of the world and where it’s heading.

• Deciphering Incentives: Work exposes the hidden plumbing of society - market dynamics, human psychology, and geopolitical shifts. You begin to see that the world isn’t run by “rules,” but by incentives and leverage.

• Cross-Domain Pollination: Applying expertise from one field (like technology) to another (like education) creates a “Superhuman” perspective. This M-Shaped approach allows you to see connections and patterns that specialists miss because they are too deep in their own silos.

• Pricing Reality: Through work, you learn the “price” of risk and the value of judgment. This is the foundation of mastering leverage.

3. The Proof: Your Work as a Living CV

In a world saturated with AI-generated noise, “credentials” are losing their value. What matters now is Proof of Work.

• Artifacts of Leverage: Your work—whether it’s Code you’ve written, Content you’ve published, or a Team you’ve built—acts as a digital army that speaks for you while you sleep.

• The Portfolio of Results: A traditional CV is a list of promises; your “Life’s Work” is a portfolio of results. It is the tangible evidence of your ability to navigate the Three Spheres of Alignment.

• Permissionless Entry: High-quality output is the ultimate “God Mode” hack. When your work is visible and valuable, you no longer need to ask for permission to enter a room or a market; the market comes to you.

4. The North Star: Work as the Vehicle for Impact

The final stage of the Superhuman Curriculum is not just personal gain, but Transcendence. This is where your output shifts from “tasks” to “Life’s Work.”

• Scalable Contribution: Using the 4 Levers (Code, Content, Capital, and People), you can amplify your impact exponentially. One well-aligned person can now solve problems that previously required an entire institution.

• Flourishing through Alignment: When you achieve External Alignment—matching your unique obsession with what the world needs—work stops feeling like a sacrifice. It becomes a form of “play” that contributes to human flourishing.

• The Evolution Loop: Your work feeds back into your system. Every success provides more capital and influence; every failure provides deeper understanding. This compounding effect is what allows the Superhuman to grow exponentially rather than linearly.

Learn more about how to build a successful career in the AI age here.

You can explore how to prepare for the future world of work here.

You Have Unique Gifts and Talents.
You are Here for a Reason.
You are Unique.
The World Needs You.

When You Speak. When You Write.
Your Words Have Power.

Are you awake?
Awaken.
Are you excited? Enlighten yourself.
Are you grateful? Shine with gratitude.
Are you aligned with your purpose? Be intentional.

Be Hungry Be Patient.
Be Driven & Angry Be At Peace & Grateful.

You have a red dot of focus.
It can only be placed in one place at one time.
You can imagine the top of Mt Everest, the moon, the bottom of the ocean.
Close your eyes and do that.
It can move instantly and effortlessly.
But It Can Only Be in One Place
It is yours. You control it.
You can direct it.
When You Do that Expands.
Practice it.
Choose it consciously and wisely.
It is your focus.

When Aligned It is Effortless.
Tap Into Your Energy Sources and Listen To It and Feel It.
Facing Fear Opens It.
You Have It In Abundance When You Listen To Yourself.

Your body is yours. It reflects your past habits.
You are the master of your body.
Feed it. Nourish it. Strengthen it. Listen to it.

Your mind is yours. All that you think is your past actions.
You are the master of your mind.
Feed it. Nourish it. Strengthen it. Listen to it.

You are here for a reason. A purpose. To shine. To become your best self. To realise your talents.
To make the world better for others.
To give.

Your Environment Is An Illusion.
Don’t Let It Deceive You.
You Are the Creator. Imagine Your World.
Visualise the Outcome. Have Faith.
Dream and Ask and It will Come.

People are with you and here for a reason.
Guide and love them and be grateful.
Listen to them and their reflections.
Learn from them. Help them but without losing yourself.
Be true to yourself.

Which direction to take? Your guide Is Within You.
Your curiosity. What are you afraid of? Face it.
What is uncomfortable? Run towards it.
Challenge yourself to grow.
What energises you - listen to it. State it. Speak it.

Imagine Your Most Capable Self as a Rival
What Would He Do - If You Were Against Him

You Don’t Have to Know the Whole Way.
Just Start Moving. As You Start The Way Appears.
It unfolds naturally.
If in Doubt Do More.
Try it.
Action Cures Fear.
It Creates More Possibilities.
You Learn.

Create Shared Visions and Goals. Courageously. Try it.

There are lessons all around if You Listen.
Be Open to Them.
Record Them.

Be grateful for any challenges, for the seeming limitations.
They are here to teach you. To strengthen you. To guide you.

Direction and Faith. Simplicity and Boundaries. Are Essential.

There are no limitations.
No fixed schedules.
There are unlimited options.
Try it. Your time is yours.
You have enough of it to do anything, to realise your vision.
Schedule and use it. Put everything in its place.

Tap Into Your Energy Sources and Listen To and Feel It.
Facing Fear Opens It.
You Have It In Abundance When You Listen To Yourself.

Be Certain.
Say Yes. Make it Happen. It will happen. If You Can’t - listen to that lesson and solve it so You Can.
Be Certain.

Your mind is constantly changing.
There is no limitation.
You are the creator.
Transcend your environment.
Choose a better one. Refill, refresh, and empower.

Awaken. Now is a new start.
What happened before you is data and lessons.
Remember the empowering times and your great accomplishments.
What happens ahead, you will now create.
By you.
You are the creator. God exists within you.
He is here to guide you.
All those who existed before you, sacrificed, and gave, are now within you.
They are cheering you on.
Make them proud.
Have faith.

Driven by years of frozen domestic tuition fees, inflation-driven costs, and shrinking international student numbers due to stricter visa rules, dozens of universities are turning to job cuts, course closures, and potential mergers to avoid insolvency.

The discussion is shallow, the problems are deeper.

The underlying reason for the crisis is that costs are rising, but tuition fees have been frozen, so universities have increasingly relied on international students, now this has been limited, they have no where to go.

The problem is that they can’t increase tuition fees for domestic students - they cannot afford to fund the universities directly from general taxation, they cannot afford the long-term balance sheet damage of underwriting massive fee hikes, and they cannot afford the political fallout of hitting voters with the true bill.

At the heart of it lies the manifestation of a deeper economic contradiction we have:

This was originally written for the US, but the UK has it much worse. Much more of the money is in housing than in US.

Housing acts as a massive tax on the productive parts of the economy.

The reason that we have reached this stalemate is that GDP is a master incentive and it incentivises short term metrics rather than long term growth.

Consumption and rent seeking rather than value creation.

If we build more houses and housing prices fall, then GDP falls, and pensions will decrease which is bad for the economy and wealth effect, and for voters.

If the UK could put more into building more houses, costs for universities would fall, but we would need to solve the other effect of pensions and short term GDP growth.

So we are stuck in between a rock and a hard place.

But the solution is to solve it in the long term and gradually rather than suddenly. By gradually developing more incentives for the stock market, value creation and lower housing.

Why? It’s a challenge to explore, and I expect there is something powerful in what’s scary.

I often previously followed the principle of doing what I find scary, and it works as a good indicator of direction to work towards, because it usually signals your comfort zone.

But things can also be scary for good reasons. There’s no point in sharing private things, that shouldn’t be shared, just for the sake of it.

Here’s something scary - because I think uncovers something that I think leads to a deeper truth.

Most people I know, I think they have an underlying flaw or problem that they’re either unaware of or they’re working on. Is there such thing as a fully developed person?

For example some people have an insecurity coming from childhood, that holds them back. Some people get anxious. Many successful people also seem to have a deeper imbalance - struggling with relationships, or being imbalanced, and I wonder if there is a flaw that I’m not more aware of.

My realisation is this:

• That we are not here for very long, so we don’t get much time to resolve or improve on issues. Now I’m 39, and when we get busy with projects, we can get sidetracked.

• I guess most people are inherently flawed in some ways. For me, I don’t think drinking is a good habit but it seems a standard part of our culture.

• I can help to improve myself and help others in the process, by being an example. I can also reflect on what issues I think others have as a lesson to learn.

So there is something true about the saying:

• Be the change you wish to see in the world.

And that’s what I hope to live out.

Rather than follow the standard of what’s expected of me.

I have more agency

• Work on the frontier, be the best, or both - that’s where the opportunity is.

• Content is leverage

• Get around smart people and leaders

• Work only on the critical bottleneck

• Leverage smart people and delegate the vision not tasks

• Have a meaningful powerful purpose

• Limit and Improve Your Inputs

• Visualise Your Goals and Make it Happen

• Seek feedback

• Be fast

• Have faith, Take Action with Certainty

I’d like to be super motivated and to hack my drive as I think this is one of the most important things to achieve incredible things.

In many ways its much easier to drive a car than it is to drive ourselves. In a car we can easily see if fuel levels are low and if we need to change a tire. Humans are much more complex, and also more subtle. We don’t have a gauge, we have ‘feelings’ which act as the signal.

It has multiple layers
1) Your Identity
2) Your why
3) Chemicals - dopamine
4) Your energy - food, sleep, and social needs
5) Your Subconscious
6) Your environment
7) Rest / repair / drive cycle.

Also sometimes Action leads to motivation rather than the other way round. So sometimes you need to take the action.

Like a car, sometimes it is hard to get started. We need to take extra effort to get it started, but then we can just easily carry the momentum forward.

So the answer to hack your drive is to work on all of theses simultaneously but also to be able to work out where the bottleneck or critical one is, it requires inner work and listening.

Motivation was never something you either have or don’t. It’s an engine - and engines can be tuned. Start with one layer. Listen to what’s blocking you. Then get moving, because sometimes the drive only shows up after you do.

Here are the most important skills of the future

• Learning - identify what to learn and how to learn it.

• Self-Understanding - understanding yourself accurately, strengths and weaknesses.

• Ethics & Integrity

• Identity - ability to understand and redesign your own identity

• Energy Management

• Emotional Regulation

• Focus and Attention Management

• Simplicity & Differentiating Signal from Noise

• Gathering feedback and feedback loops

• Boundaries

• Empathy & Putting Yourself in Others Shoes & Like-ability

• Time Management & Leverage

• Taste & Presentation

• Critical Thinking

• Systems Thinking and Building

• Market Understanding

• Decision Making

• Financial Management

• Writing - the ability to think and write your thoughts into clear coherent persuasively

• Speaking - the ability to speak your thoughts clearly, coherent and persuasively

Here is a framework of the how to learn these core skills

I feel like writing, but what to write about?

I was staring at the blank page.

But my resolution was to just start writing.

When you start with any project, it can seem daunting.

You feel like you have to come up with a grand idea.

It puts pressure on you.

But if you just start with the first idea that comes to your head, then you have momentum. You’re in the flow. You’re doing it.

And then the rest of it just flows naturally.

It gets your creative juices flowing.

Then you can go back and edit it - considering the person you’re writing for in mind, or you can riff off one of the ideas to go in another direction.

You can share it with AI with a specific prompt like “is this a good article how can it be improved?” or a friend for feedback

You can just talk honestly.

It’s the same with projects and work.

It’s the same when you hesitate to do anything.

To speak to the person, to go to the event, to go to the gym.

Just start and the action creates momentum and gives you data and information to work with.

This isn’t a university principle. No principle is.

I’ve come to learn with every idea there is always a counter principle - which could be - think before you act, plan it out, and there are rules to apply different both of these opposing principles, and exceptions.

That’s part of the art of modern wisdom.

It’s because writing is a craft, it’s a skill, and the more you do it, the better you become at it.

The friction and challenge of writing is what makes it valuable.

Writing is also thought.

When you write, you are putting your ideas out, developing them, and you can understand them more clearly.

You can go back to them, re-read and improve them and deeply understand them, and come to profound truths that you couldn’t have got to before.

When you write things yourself, you discover things.

And when you use AI to write, it weakens it because it “averages” it. It’s what an LLM model predicts should be next.

There is something about the writing process that is inherently valuable in itself.

It’s almost spiritual.

No AI is going to come out with an article like this. (Unless you sat a million monkeys down as the shakespeare infinite monkey theorem goes)

I’ll share it with AI for feedback but I’ll take it or not depending on how valuable it is.

I don’t expect any or many people to read this, and I’m writing in notes format, that I can repurpose or improve for sharing.

I look at my desk and I see objects there, a tripod for a camera, a glass fitting perfectly inside a donut shape lamp base. A timer that I bought from taobao and broke easily.

As I explore the desk I realise something more profound.

That there is something powerful in the micro.

I think this is a philosophy I’ve had for whole my life when I reflect on my career.

I wanted to do something small very well, and I knew that by doing that I could do something big very well.

I started recruiting first for a law university, partly because i was recommended to it by a friend, but I was also drawn and called to it.

I wanted to do something like that, combining people and technology, but I also wanted to do something small, exceptionally well.

I chose a small problem and became the only person tackling it, there was no competition, and I could own it.

I may have chosen the small problem because I knew it was safe.

Safe from big companies, safe to be explored. Safe to own.

On reflection, the initial opportunity was inherently capped, but the lessons were definitely there, and the opportunity was.

I’ve also read that many people look at a niche and then explore it outwards.

Almost like a sandbox.

This is why I think focusing on a micro thing is really so valuable.

Because the world we live in is infinitely complex, and there are new insights to be found everywhere.

And in order to understand the macro you have to understand the micro.

To understand the economy you have to understand people. To understand people you have to understand diet, cells, energy.

And this principle is also one of the reasons why individualism is so powerful. It’s bottoms up thinking. Scaling the micro to the macro.

It’s:

• First principles thinking

• Reductionism

• Microcosm reflects macrocosm

• Fractal Symmetry

• Emergence

• The Butterfly Effect and Entropy

If you can understand DNA you can understand the person.

Like a seed provides a blueprint for a forest.

A small complete system is more knowable than a large incomplete view of a bigger system. The village is more understandable than the fragment of a city you happen to be standing in.

Simple and local often outperforms complex and global - not because it's unsophisticated, but because it's complete.

The entrepreneur who starts small isn't being timid - they're choosing a scale at which reality is still legible.

This article is an exact example of what I mean.

I started this article with the goal of just describing my desk, and here I am having discovered a deep principle that I didn’t know about myself, and having written it, I feel I understand it much better.

There are also multiple other directions I could have taken this article. I could have continued describing the desk in more detail, or the items and their stories, or whether I should clean my desk or not, which could have led to various other directions.

But that is a far easier way to start an article than to look at something big. But of course to every principle there is a counter principle depending on the topic.

And I also get incredibly motivated by big things, because now I’m not afraid to fail. I am prepared to give it my shot, and go for it. I understand myself and the world much better.

And thats what I’m ready for next.

I can hear the sound of the third ring road.

Although I don’t live particularly close to it

A constant flow of traffic.

Possibly a slight, light tinnitus, now I stop to think about it.

A dog barking.

Is this tinnitus even real? I start prompting AI.

Some beeping horns and more dogs barking.

I never realised there were so many noises.

I move to another room to test the source

The pipes make a sound.

The wind blows against the window.

The fridge is making a low humming noise, which might be what I mist-took for tinnitus. Or it could be the air conditioning.

A louder sound of traffic which must be a lorry.

These background noises are so loud.

A vehicle reverses, and some more beeps.

The flow of traffic on the third ring is almost like a river or waterfall.

I can hear a sports car or a motorbike accelerate.

With some more beeping.

Now it sounds like a bus. I recognise it from when I once took a 3 hour bus ride in Wuhan.

I once ate in a Chinese hotpot restaurant in Guilin, which had a power cut. The cut removed all the noise of the cooking, the electrics and it sounded so silent.

We forget that we have all this background noise, we just tune it out.

With the wind and the traffic and beeping and the fridge. I can hear at different times depending on what I focus on.

I’ve been learning to write by focusing on a specific, by exploring some specific direction, rather than with a grand vision in mind.

Because by exploring in this way it’s more real and honest, and often more profound, because it’s based on something real.

In this one I was trying to be more descriptive, but it ended up being an exploration of sounds rather than how I described it.

And who said writing has to be a certain way?

I am fascinated by the huge potential there is in the world. There are so many different directions you can take and things you can focus on.

The printer making a small re-calibration.

Yes that must be what I heard earlier too.

A neighbour closes a door outside.

I once had the idea to make a music video of Beijing by capturing the sounds.

I think in many cases most people shouldn’t listen to the top leaders in a field. They have survivorship bias.

Marc Andreessen was obviously incredibly smart, and driven, founded an incredible company and was surrounded by talented people. He is at the epicenter of the software industry. His psychology obviously works for him.

It’s hard to know what factor luck - the right combination of drive, intelligence, ability and timing played in certain things happening.

If it aint broke - don’t fix it!
As the American saying goes.

But his success isn't proof that introspection is useless.

Before continuing this I’d like to differentiate and define

Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes - essentially “looking inward” to understand your own thoughts, feelings, and motives.

Metacognition is commonly defined as “thinking about thinking” or awareness of one’s own cognitive processes.

I think thinking and ruminating on the past, going to therapy and trying to resolve past trauma’s can be a waste of time.

By dwelling on problems you can make them worse.

In order to solve problems you have to look forward to overcome the short term obstacles.

Eileen Gu talks about how metacognition and thinking and improving how you think is one of the most useful ways to improve.

For Marc Andreessen - The people and environment he is surrounded by is the introspection. He has externalised the introspection. They are the mirrors and he is exposed to massive amount of reinforcement and lessons that he can use to guide his journey.

People can be driven by the pain of their past or from something.

This is actually a pattern of some of the great founders in history who came from and had difficult families and starts in life.

This includes people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Genghis Khan and many many more. Becoming successful helped to fill a void - because they had something to prove.

This is wound-driven ambition.

And they’d rather not introspect for fear of losing that edge and drive. For them, they already have that make up, and the pain that drives them, and introspection might cost some people their edge

If these people wanted to be happier and resolve underlying psychological issues they could introspect, but it might mean they lose their edge.

But what if you don’t have that pain? You have to find something else, and that is the introspection.

Rather than finding pain, find these pain equivalents that generate similar energy without the damage:

• Urgency - mortality awareness. You have finite time. That’s real, not manufactured. Memento mori is one of the oldest drive tools in history

• Injustice - find something in the world that genuinely angers you and build against it

• Responsibility - people depending on you generates similar neurochemistry to survival drive without the wound

• Competition - a worthy rival activates the same chemicals as threat

• Meaningful stakes - attach your work to something larger than yourself

But there is also wholeness-driven ambition.

Not all great ambition comes from wounds. Warren Buffett has spoken about genuinely loving what he does - he famously says he "tap dances to work."

Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft not through ego or hunger but through empathy and inner security. These are people driven not by what they lack but by what they are. Their ambition comes from full expression of their capabilities rather than compensation for their pain.

They move toward something rather than away from something. And crucially - they can stop. Wound-driven people almost never can. This is wholeness-driven ambition, and it may be the most sustainable fuel there is.

There is an argument to say that you might not need to "find pain" and not "be at peace" but be so fully yourself that not moving forward feels like the real loss.

Or you can learn to use all these parts to drive you forward. Find the pain or manufacture it.

A taxi driver in Dubai recently asked me how he can be successful. He’s considering launching a business. For him, and most people around the world, he’s obviously hit a wall, and no amount of working hard is going to solve it.

Like many people around the world, he has to look inside.

For most people having an elite level of understanding about themselves, their strengths, is absolutely necessary. If they don’t have a fire from their background and something to prove.

For most people, no one is handing them a world-class mirror. No brilliant co-founder challenging their thinking, no board of directors holding them accountable, no ecosystem of elite peers raising their standards daily.

If you're that taxi driver in Dubai - or the millions like him - introspection isn't a luxury or a therapy exercise. It's the only feedback loop you've got.

They’ve got some ideas, shared it with AI, and they’ve come out with something profound.

They share it online, and people comment and interact.

But it feels odd, like I can’t understand what they are thinking or why they are creating and engaging with what feels like AI slop.

An AI Messiah is a normal person who has arrived at some revelation, usually with the assistance of AI, and then feels compelled to post it online.

AI is a mirror that reflects our most pretentious selves. Because it is trained on other AI Messiahs online.

It is a form of collapse, and cultural collapse.

And social media also rewards content that posts in a Messianic way.

Reflecting on my own writing I’ve realised that I’m like that too.

And this article is itself a version of that!

We have a natural tendency to write in hyperbole or inflate my writing to make it seem more grand and profound, because it has to be profound right?

It’s embarrassing because when you grow you look back on your previous work and it feels cringey.

Why is that? Why do I write like this.

I asked claude, and I explored great writers like George Orwell.

He is one of the best writers I’ve ever read and studied, especially Politics and the English Language.

Because real writing is scary, it needs courage. It’s specific, it’s vulnerable.

You feel like you’re taking a risk, and when you publish it you feel that vulnerability.

I’ve created some content before and it’s got hundreds of thousands or millions of views, and I always have this feeling before posting that it will have a big reach and be seen.

I have this sense of excitement to check it later.

I’ve realised that you need to write in private first, without trying to be profound, and most of it is crap. You can delete it. Or you can publish it if you want.

Some of it will be good enough to publish.

And then you can see how it goes and learn from it. As you do it more you can learn and improve.

The best writing should be written 100% by yourself.

It is exploratory.

You don’t know where it will go.

What is the opposite of an AI Messianic post?
- Specific
- Contradictory
- Original new data
- Ugly
- Authentic

You could call them:
- The witness
- The heretic to the global average
- The amateur - from the latin - one who loves

There is something sacred about writing, because it is thought.

Writing is telepathy.

That’s why I love it.

And I also feel like the way humans write and the way AI writes is similar.

As I am writing I don’t know what I’m going to say next.

I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s almost like a prediction.

So maybe there is something about intelligence that is the same with AI and human intelligence.

But I don’t have an answer or a grand conclusion.

This writing is an exploration.

And that’s what the best writing should be.