reject to win

The exhaustion most professionals feel right now has nothing to do with AI, skills, or tools.

The more I think about it, the more I think it's the sensation of losing a way of thinking they didn't know they were using, and calling the loss by the wrong name.

For about twenty years, professional work was judged mainly on execution.

You usually needed to produce the work yourself to express any point of view, which meant years of learning software, writing memos, building decks, or typing code.

You couldn’t express taste about anything unless you made it yourself.

As a result, people mostly compared work with others who had similar production skills, and that shaped how the field looked.

Then AI happened, and the filter dropped.

Now no one needs the decade of training, because the decade was training in execution, and execution itself is now a series of prompts and the right tool.

Which means your work was never as scarce as the market made it look and the execution moat is no ones.

A tool can now produce forty versions of a thing in a minute.

The work is looking at the output and saying, in thirty seconds, "none of these, do it again, make the colour colder and the type heavier."

The rejection is the work.

Most people can't do this at speed. 

They can appreciate good work when they see it, and feel when something is off, but both of those are softer versions of the real thing.

I don't think this skill has a clean name yet.

It's taste plus speed plus articulation plus the psychological willingness to be certain.

Most professional work so far rewarded the opposite, patient, iterative, let's-sit-with-it method that made it expensive.

When making becomes inexpensive, patience stops being thoughtful and starts being paralysis.

We arrived with a rough instinct, sketched, reacted to what came out, and somewhere in the middle of the making, we discovered what we thought.

The making was the thinking.

This worked for a century because making was slow enough to think during. 

Working on a logo on a typical two-week timeline meant it was two weeks of the designer figuring out, through the making, what the logo should be. 

The client was paying for the designer to use the production process as a thinking process.

AI compressed the thinking-through-making process to zero. 

The tool produces forty options before you've thought through one, which means iterating is basically thrashing (and not thinking).

The real problem is that their way of thinking requires slow execution, and execution is no longer slow. 

The bottleneck is whether you show up already knowing what you think.

The people who show up to tools with a stable formed view built it in the unpaid hours, reading things nobody asked them to read, forming opinions about work in their field that nobody commissioned, or staying up too late on a Tuesday because they couldn't stop thinking about a problem that wasn't theirs.

Nobody pays you for any of this. You do it because something in you won't let the question go.

That's the split:

You are either the person who has been doing this for years, and your reference library is about to compound in a way nobody tracked on a résumé. 

Or you are the person whose relationship with your field was contained inside the working day, and the working day has just been automated out from under you.

You can't manufacture a reference library by deciding tomorrow to build one.

Your professional identity was load-bearing on paid hours, and the paid hours have stopped generating the thing that mattered.

Either you have been, or you haven't.

Reply and tell me which one, and what you're going to do about it.
Nandini

PS: Hopefully this gives you a real sense of leverage / increasing output per person and reducing headcount.