I am writing this as a personal reflection, but I am sure it will resonate with a lot of folks. Don’t take it in a negative way, look at it as a moment of truth.
Digital Work Explosion & the drugery of “run-of-the-mill” work
In the last decade, everything was digitized and most work happened digitally. Especially, software engineering and product development exploded. Consequently, organizations scaled with a lot of digital workers and hierarchies were built to manage it.
In large organizations this led to a lot of glue work and run-of-the-mill ideas. Basically, 80% of ideas and work we did was mostly remix of existing ideas adding very little real value. Most of us did that 80% of the run-of-the-mill average stuff and got by with good salaries and survived and thrived.
There were obviously those 10X folks who spent a lot of their time on 20% high-value work (bringing judgement, taste, deeper thinking, going the extra mile, etc) that created 80% of the value!
The AI Shift
As AI democratizes run-of-the-mill work from digital tasks, all that 80% of the low value work is suddenly gone. It should NOT take more than 20% of our time now . Suddenely, 1x looks really bad as these folks are still spending most of their time in the “run-of-the-mill” work.
The 10X folks, on the other hand (look at the top programmers, top designers, or anyone top in their field), are beasts now. They look 100X or even 1000X. They had the taste, the judgment, the depth, the second-order thinking, the business sense, and what not. But doing stuff and managing bureaucracy took the life out of them. All this goes out with AI.
With AI, 80% of drudgery work takes 20% of the time. 20% of the real value work should now take 80% of the time.
Aim 10X or nothing
Aim to be 10X: think deeper, develop taste and judgment, be opinionated, second-order thinking, domain knowledge. Thats the only skill left in digital work!
Spend 80% of your time on high-value work and 20% of time on drudgery work.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!