Combining skills can make you harder to replace

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 53:30

   of that. So maybe what I'm hearing here is kind of this T-shaped strategy of if you want to be successful in any three of these roles, be very, very, very good at that specific role, product management, engineering, design, and then get good enough at these other two roles. Well, so I think that's great. I think that's really, really relevant. And then, you know, Scott, you know, Scott Adamson, firstly, just passed away, you know, which is a real tragedy.

2. 53:52

   But I was always, I referred for years to actually Scott Adams. He had this famous kind of career advice he would give people, which I think makes a lot of sense, which dovetails with what you're saying. Which is, he used to say, he used to say, it's like, look, he said, you know, I could have been a pretty good cartoonist or I could have been like pretty good at business. But the fact that I was a cartoonist who understood business made me like spectacularly great at making Dobert.

3. 54:18

   right because even the world's best cartoonist who didn't understand business could have never written Dilbert and then the world's best business people who didn't know how to do cartoons couldn't have done Dilbert it took somebody who actually had both of those skills to be able to make Dilbert right which is one of the most successful cartoons in history right and so so the way Scott always described it was that that that from a career development standpoint the additive effect of being good at two things is like more than double right um the additive effect of being good at three things is more than triple, right? Because you become a super relevant specialist in the combination of the domains. And you see this all over the economy, but I'll give you an example.

4. 54:59

   Hollywood, just Hollywood as an example, there are a lot of writers who can't direct a movie, and they can be very successful writers. There are a lot of directors who can't write a movie, they can be very successful directors. But the superstars in the entertainment industry are the people who can write and direct, right? And, you know, they don't have a term for those. They call those auteurs, right?

5. 55:16

   And that's, you know, those are the people who are, like, the real creative forces that move the field. And so, again, and by the way, Hollywood, it's just really funny. I've been spending a lot of time talking to Hollywood people about AI. Hollywood has the same Mexican standoff going right now that we described in tech, except in Hollywood, for example, for filmmaking, it's the director, it's the writer, and the actor, right?

6. 55:35

   Because the director is now thinking, wow, I don't need the writer anymore because the AI can write the script, and I don't need the actor anymore because I can have AI actors. So the writer is saying, well, I don't need the director because I can direct the movie and I can do the actors. And the actor is saying, I don't need either one of these guys. I can have the AI direct the thing. I can have the AI write the thing.

7. 55:51

   And I'm just going to show up and do my performance, right? And so it's the same kind of triangular configuration. And again, what's great about it is they're all correct, right? Each person in each of those three fields is going to be able to expand laterally and pick up those additional skills. And then as a consequence, you're going to have more people who can write and direct or write and act or direct and act or do all three. And I think, to your point, your T-shift thing, I think that's going to be true basically across the entire economy. And if you think about the T, if you think about the T configuration, it's like, yeah, the breadth, the breadth, the top of the T is like, how many individual domains are you familiar enough with to be able to use the AI tools to be able to do really good work? And then this part of the T is how deep can you go

8. 56:35

   in at least one of those domains so that you really, really deeply know what you're doing? but like if you're like super deep on coding and you can use AI to do design and you can use AI to do product management right that's your t right there and you're a triple threat at the top of the t but with this level of technical grounding underneath that and I mean at that point you're again you're the super empowered individual you're going to be able to just perform like feats of magic uh for example in terms of designing and building your products you know the people in my generation couldn't even dreamed of and so I I think I think that this is a universal kind of theory that I think can apply across the entire economy I'm going to invent a new framework right now. Okay, forget the T framework. I'm picturing an F sideways or an E,

9. 57:13

   where there's three, two or three, I don't know, downward parts. And so what I'm hearing is get good at least two. Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. Yeah, the combination, yeah. My friend Larry Summers had a different version of the Scott Adams thing, which is he used to tell people, he said, the key for career planning is he said, don't be fungible, right? And he's an economist. And so that was economics speaking. And what that means is, what that means essentially is don't be replaceable. And so don't be a cog, right? So, and what that meant was don't just be one thing, right? So if you're, if you're, if you're quote unquote, you know, again, just a designer, just a product manager, just a decoder, like then in theory, you can be swapped in or out.

10. 57:52

    But if you have this, if you have this, yeah, if you have this E or F, you know, laying on inside kind of thing, and if you have, if you have this combination of things, it's actually quite rare, then all of a sudden you're not fungible. Not only you're not fungible, like you're actually massively important because you're one of the only people in the world who can actually do that combination of things. And yeah, your ability to not become one of those people is like titanically enhanced with AI as compared to anything we've ever seen before.

11. 58:14

    This is so interesting because I've worked with people that are good at these two skills and they were always called unicorns at the company. She can code and design. Oh my God. And what I'm hearing here is this is what you need to become. You need to become really good at at least two things. I think you used the term smokestack or something where it's like PM over here, engineer design. And what I'm hearing here is you need to get good at at least two of these skills, the silos of these two roles are disappearing. That's right. That's right. And again, I can't overstress the following for anybody listening to this. The thing about AI that I think people are just like not getting enough benefit out of yet is just it will teach you. Like, this is amazing. Like, there's never been a technology before where you can ask it, like,

12. 58:55

    teach me how to do this thing. So I always feel like it's like, it's like people spend too much. It's one of these things where it's like so much focus on figuring out how to use like a large language model is like, okay, what am I going to try to get it to do for me? Right. Which is, of course, very important. But the other side of it is what can I get it to teach me how to do? Right. And it's, it's just as good at that. Right. Um, and so again, this is this level, this level of latent superpower, like, you know, people who really want to like improve themselves and like develop their career should be spending every, every spare hour in my view, at this point, talking to an AI being like, all right, train, train me up, like tell me, tell me, super empower me, tell me how to, you know, train, train me, train me how to be, you know, I'm a coder,

13. 59:31

    Train me how to be a product manager. It will happily do that. It knows exactly how to do that. You know, run me, make me problems, you know, make me assignments, then evaluate my results. Right. And it will do that just as happily as it will do work, quote unquote, for you. Two tricks I've heard along those lines. One is to watch the output, what the agent is doing and