Bet On Yourself

I spent years in corporate America with a feeling I couldn't shake: almost everybody is bad at their jobs.

Not incompetent, exactly. More like... absent. Checked out. Withholding. If you're lucky enough to find yourself in a mega corporation or a big enough bureaucracy, you can cover your ass, avoid working on anything meaningful, and do quite well. You separate your life from your work. You go home. Maybe you find hobbies, but probably you just scroll your phone and float through existence.

This isn't a hot take. There's a name for it. David Graeber wrote an entire book called Bullshit Jobs about how late capitalism created millions of positions that even the people doing them secretly know are pointless. Administrative coordinators. Assistant vice presidents. Engagement Managers. Roles that exist to justify other roles, meetings that spawn more meetings, process layered on process until no one can remember what the actual work was supposed to be.

The bullshit jobs era wasn't just about wasted labor. It was about learned helplessness at scale. You were sorted into a narrow lane, told you couldn't do X because that's someone else's department, rewarded for sitting in meetings and managing perceptions rather than creating anything. The culture ran on "no, because." No, we can't do that — wrong department. No, that's too risky. No, we'd need to engage a specialist. No, that's not how we do things here.

I'm not nostalgic for any of it.

The Bet That Failed

Here's what the old era taught you: bet on the system. Bet on your employer. Bet on your specialization, your title, your career ladder. Stay in your lane, accumulate credentials, and the system will take care of you.

That bet is now worthless.

Not because corporations are collapsing or because AI is about to replace everyone overnight. Both the doomers who say AI will take every job and the skeptics who mock its hallucinations are missing what's actually happening. The real shift is simpler and more profound: the barriers to good enough execution collapsed.

You used to need a designer to make something look professional. You needed a developer to build a prototype. You needed a copywriter to draft the pitch, a data analyst to run the numbers, a strategist to frame the problem. Each of these specialists had real skills that took years to develop, and accessing those skills required budget, coordination, politics.

Now you can get to "kind of works" in an afternoon. By yourself. In domains you've never touched.

This isn't about AI being brilliant. It's about AI being passable at everything. That's the superpower. Not that it will make you the world's leading expert in any field, but that it can do a decent job — or teach you enough to do a decent job — in any domain you point it at. AI already knows more than any single human in the world. And the amazing thing is it can level up on demand. Ask it to give you a broad understanding of a topic. Then ask it to be an expert in a single element and apply best practices from that domain. It can do it.

The moat around specialists just evaporated. Which means the excuse you've been using, "I can't do that, I'm not qualified," just became a choice.

The New Bet

So here's the question: are you going to bet on yourself?

Betting on yourself means you stop waiting for permission. You stop outsourcing your capability to specialists. You stop hiding behind "that's not my job" or "we'd need to bring in an agency for that."

You start saying yes to things — your own ideas, your coworker's ideas, the weird projects that have been sitting in the neglected corner of your brain.

This is what I mean by the "yes, and" posture. It's borrowed from improv, where the cardinal rule is to accept what your scene partner gives you and build on it. The opposite kills momentum: "No, that's stupid" or "No, that won't work" or "No, we don't have the resources." In the old era, "no, because" was how you protected yourself. Now it's how you guarantee irrelevance.

Yes, and is how you make bets pay off. Someone has an idea? Say yes, build a quick prototype, ask ChatGPT what an expert would do, show it back to them. Now you're collaborating instead of shutting them down. You're playing together. You're iterating toward something neither of you could have made alone.

Work should feel like play. That sounds naive, but I mean it literally. The yes, and posture is about scratching itches, pulling threads, taking an idea and seeing where it goes. It's easier now because the cost of trying is so low. You're not committing a team and a budget to explore a concept. You're spending an afternoon.

The Gap Still Exists (But It's Narrower)

There's a famous bit from Ira Glass that every creative person should hear:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit... And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions."

This is still true. AI doesn't eliminate the gap between your taste and your ability. Your first attempt at anything — design, strategy, code, writing — will still not be good. Your taste will tell you it's not good. That tension is still real.

But here's what's changed: getting to that first attempt is faster than ever, and it won't suck as bad.

If getting good is about at-bats, what happens when time per at-bat shrinks by an order of magnitude? Way more at-bats.

This is why I think about the process in three steps:

Make it kind of work. This is where AI shines. Prototype, first draft, proof of concept. It's imperfect, but it exists. You've gone from nothing to something in hours instead of weeks.

Make it useful. Ship it to someone — yourself, a colleague, a small group. Get feedback. Learn what actually matters versus what you assumed would matter. The artifact is now in the world, being tested.

Make it good. Now you iterate with taste. Refine. Polish. Cut the parts that don't work, strengthen the parts that do. This is where your craft matters, where your judgment earns its keep.

The quality bar hasn't lowered. You just reach it through iteration rather than upfront perfection. And this only works if you kill the shame around shipping imperfect things.

The Deep Work Imperative

Here's where I'll complicate the "say yes to everything" message: you still have to do hard things.

I profoundly believe in the power of deep work. Doing one hard thing a day is better for you and humanity than doing dozens of easy things. Shallow work (emails, scheduling, coordination, status updates) fills time without creating value. Deep work (thinking hard about a problem, building something real, wrestling with complexity) is where actual contribution happens.

AI is going to automate away the easy things. That's not a threat; it's a gift. It means the remaining work is the hard work, the meaningful work, the work that requires human judgment and creativity.

The paradox resolves like this: you say yes to more things, but the things you're saying yes to are substantive problems, not busywork. AI handles large swaths of the execution, filling gaps and autocompleting, freeing you to think deeply about strategy, positioning, what actually matters.

Old pattern: "I'd love to explore that idea, but I'd need to coordinate with marketing, engineering, design, legal..." So you never start.

New pattern: "I'm going to spend today going deep on this idea. I'll prototype it myself and see if it has legs."

Our Bet

Let's be honest about who wins here, and how funny it is that "agentic" is both the word that describes the person and the technology.

People with high agency, agentic people, are the ones who see the gap between "kind of works" and "good" as an opportunity, not a threat. Who are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid experimentation. Who have an internal locus of control — a genuine belief that they can shape their own outcomes.

The people who struggle are the ones who optimized for the old game. Who are comfortable in meetings eight hours a day. Who think work equals PowerPoints. Who need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. Who are still hiding behind "that's not my job."

I'm not going to pretend this transition is painless. Jobs will become redundant. Some already have. The displacement is real, and it's uncomfortable to acknowledge that while also being genuinely excited about what's possible.

But here's the uncomfortable part: you don't really have an excuse anymore. The barriers were real. Then they weren't. The question of "can I do this?" has been replaced by "will I do this?" If you choose not to — if you stay in your narrow lane, wait for permission, hide behind specialists and process — that's a choice. You're choosing to stay stuck.

This isn't about working harder or hustling more. Hustle culture was part of the old era, another form of performing work rather than doing it. This is about saying yes to the project, the idea, the challenge. Getting to version one. Figuring out what would make it good. Doing the work.

If you want to have a say in what your career looks like in five or ten years, now is the time to get engaged. Not next quarter. Not when the tools get better. Now. The gap between early movers and everyone else is widening every month, and the people shaping the next era are the ones already in motion.

I'm not going back to a bullshit job. I'm not going back to sitting in meetings pretending that's contribution. I'm not going back to "no, because."