💎 Becoming Human – The Most Valuable Technical Skill.
What is worth my time and effort?
Simple question, complicated answer.
No one knows exactly how far, or fast, AI will advance in the future — not even Sam Altman.
However, let’s assume an improvement factor of .01, compounded daily over four years (the average timeframe of completing a bachelor’s degree).
The technology won’t be 10 times better. It won’t be 100 times better.
It’s going to be approximately 2 million.
1,958,484.90027 = (1.01)^(365*4).
Of course, this is a theoretical figure, not a prediction. Real-world progress doesn’t follow clean exponential curves.
Still, the direction is clear: AI is accelerating. GPT-4, for example, scores in the top percentile on many verbal reasoning tasks — approaching or even exceeding what we associate with human “genius.”
But here's what keeps nagging at me: If millions of people are learning the same things from the same sources — lectures, degrees, online content — what makes me different?
Where do I find my edge?
Perception — the Unique Value Proposition of Humanity
I went to the movies with five friends; we watched the same film, but left with five different impressions.
It intrigued me: how can exposure to the same stimulus trigger a disparate reaction?
My friends related their own experiences to the movie.
Previous memories, emotions, and knowledge polish our sense of perspective.
Throughout life, I’ve tried to nurture interests, intellectual curiosities, and hobbies, seeking to discover my own sense of taste.
While a college degree is useful, systemized knowledge is becoming saturated. More concerningly, that rate of saturation continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Foundational knowledge is essential, but the world is demanding more.
Choose a major, accumulate skills, draw a comfortable circle of what you can and can't do, and perform the same repetitions over and over again.
That age is now dead.
We train to become an academic weapon, to one day become a corporate weapon.
AI agents are now becoming the weapon.
People who know how to direct it will win.
In 5, 10, 15 years, if the execution ability of AI agents grows exponentially, what’s left for us?
Intuition and creativity.
These skills are fundamentally derived from perception.
What’s the point in trying?
“It’s cooked. AI is coming for everyone’s job. There’s no point in trying to learn”.
Some people view the emergence of AI agents as a justification to give up on their degree, losing faith in the act of effort itself.
I would argue it’s never been more important to learn; The bar for generating novel thinking and intuition will rise, as it stands as our key competitive advantage.
If you heard a compelling speaker or teacher explain a concept and think “wow, I’ve never heard someone explain an idea like they did”, it’s likely infused with their perception and sense of taste.
Unlike most people, they didn’t stop after reading a textbook definition, a basic Google search, or spamming a GPT query.
They went one step further and related it to their own perspective, experiences, and previous knowledge.
It’s the digestion — not the consumption of information — which produces originality.
This is why it feels impossible to retain information from a 60-minute lecture or rereading a textbook.
With so much information overloading my brain, I simply couldn’t hold on to anything.
Instead, for every 5-minute interval, I tried to process something. I tried to relate it to something else. I formulated more questions and forced it to feel relevant.
While this feels tedious upfront, this method felt significantly more efficient and effective than route memorization.
The most broken skillset: learning how to learn.
While I’m not an expert in this domain, I’ve taken inspiration from those who are: Justin Sung — a previous medical student and current PHD in learning science — reviews literature that supports the most efficient methods.
His central focus emphasizes the importance of building “knowledge schemas”.
The brain retains information by forming and stimulating neural networks; the learning process is a never-ending, iterative refinement of building a web of ideas and connecting them.
While studying an idea, experts don’t view it in isolation.
Instead, they toss it around and play with it. They test the boundaries of its applications, assumptions, and limitations.
The underlying mechanics behind a concept only become apparent after you compare it to other concepts, examples, and experiences (which became the most valuable takeaway I learned from speech and debate)
This ties full circle to the idea of perception: people learn differently because their minds operate from different levels of experience. This is why some ideas are easier to learn, while others demand more heavy lifting.
It’s because of relevance.
The Paradox of the Pareto Principle.
I read newsletters for a reason. I write them for the same one.
In the age of AI, the conventional approach to learning is searching for the actionable, 5-bullet point summary from Perplexity/ChatGPT.
At this point, why pick up a book? Why listen to a podcast?
While the 80/20 principle is valuable, it’s getting abused.
Of course, skimming and obtaining key takeaways are necessary; the mind needs to prioritize or else it will drown in senseless noise.
Moreover, when you open a book, you will dive into a sea of perspectives, examples, and stories.
More often than not, every sentence won’t be the golden nugget you’re looking for.
However, it significantly enhances the probability that at least one granular piece of information will “click” more than others; it starts speaking to your context.
In essence, long-form content expands your surface area for hyper-personalized relevance.
But why waste your time?
Why sort through 10 examples when only one ends up clicking?
Two reasons
1.) You're only one “click” away from achieving a breakthrough
Understanding is not learning. Learning arises from a change in behavior.
Ever had a friend who really shouldn’t be dating someone? You can fire away, one red flag after the other.
More surprisingly, each reason makes perfect sense to them, but guess what? They’re still stuck in the same position.
They understand it’s detrimental, but there’s an implicit level of cognitive dissonance preventing them from changing.
Someone who knows they have a bad habit but hasn’t broken it hasn’t truly learned.
Triggering these internal clicks is an absolute game-changer; it allows you to process and apply knowledge in a way that is tailored to your own context.
The real strength of nurturing perception isn’t for yourself but to help others.
When you can sit, non-judgmentally, into another person’s mind, experiences, memories, social conditioning, and emotions — without integrating your judgment of what it should’ve been instead — that’s when you empower each other to improve.
Why would anyone look forward to learning from someone who dismisses their perception? After all, it’s the defining characteristic of what makes us human.
It took me long enough to realize that conversation is not an exchange of words but one of understanding, where you teach and learn simultaneously with another person.
2.) What you don’t know is infinitely more valuable than what you do know.
The context you currently have is limiting the outcomes you could have.
If you keep looking for the same information, with the same search query, you won’t pull differentiated insights or outputs.
In an AI-driven economy, knowing what to look for — and how to look for it — is the ultimate trump card.
For example, let’s take someone trying to scale their own business by launching a social media platform. However, they don’t know how to generate good ideas consistently.
They log in to ChatGPT and search “give me 30 content posts for making LinkedIn posts to grow my online coaching business”.
Clearly, you're not attracting a loyal audience by shoving generic content into everyone’s feed.
Maybe you stumble on popular entrepreneurial influencers, such as Alex Hormozi, on building a personal brand.
He may share stories about how difficult it was to grow his online presence, especially when he was broke and didn’t have any “perceived credibility”. Afterward, he explains how he overcame this trap by speaking from his own experience and giving advice to the right customer avatar (an audience who struggles with problems he’s recently solved).
Now, you feel empowered to do something different. You’ve seen proof of concept from someone else who succeeded in your position. Something internally “clicks” because it feels relevant and actionable.
Thus, your strategy shifts. Instead of feeding ChatGPT a generic prompt about making content ideas, you’ve expanded your level of awareness of what good content even means.
Is it relatable? Does it speak to a customer avatar? How do you make a customer avatar based on your own goals? What experiences, struggles, and personal stories do I have that my audience could relate to? What systems can I implement to capture the personal lessons that I’ve learned?
Then you start feeding GPT these questions. You string together the outputs that are relevant to you and provide a tailored search query.
Improving your context demands exposure to perspectives that you haven’t previously considered. Subsequently, you “digest” the knowledge by making it relevant to your own sense of perception.
This is the iterative loop of learning, which is uniquely favored by long-form content.
Think of a newsletter, book, or podcast as a fishing rod that gives you multiple baits to latch on to. Some might bite with the first, others with the last.
Long-form content isn’t fast food: it’s not cheap, nor is it as convenient an “actionable takeaway”.
It’s a home-cooked meal that takes time to marinate and season, but leaves a differentiated flavor that becomes difficult to replicate.
That’s what it means to prompt engineer with your own taste.
To thrive under an AI-driven economy, you need to have the intuition to guide the technology in a direction that other people wouldn’t.
A Framework for Creativity
Humans must harness “creativity” above intelligence: this is the conventional thought leadership on Tech Twitter.
First question that naturally arises: how do you get more creative?
This may sound counterintuitive, but add more structure.
When my brain lacked direction or goals, it didn’t know which signals and sensory details to pick up on.
A cluttered brain is not a creative one.
When you set a target, the subconscious mind becomes a giant magnet that absorbs relevant knowledge and experiences. That’s when the “ creative juices start flowing”.
Writer’s block is a symptom of poor clarity, brainstorming, and structure.
I’ve found that once I set an appropriate target on what problem to solve, my mind is primed for creating unconventional connections to obtain a better answer.
Afterward, I go on a walk, take a shower, and relax.
Beforehand, I mindlessly wandered before establishing a mental map or outline, crossing my fingers that better ideas would magically fall into my hands.
Here’s what I followed instead: Set the direction, drift, and obtain better direction.
A recipe for mixing the right ingredients.
Once you start thinking differently, how do you ensure you aren’t wasting your time learning and connecting information that doesn’t provide any utility?
Learning other people’s perceptions is just as important as understanding your own.
Despite the accelerating pace of AI, the laws of economics will remain constant: the resources you obtain are a function of exchanging value to someone else, at scale.
In other words, your perception will guide the connections you make, while simultaneously providing value to someone else.
Thus, I started to raise my awareness, carefully observing problems that felt natural for me to solve.
When my cofounders and I scaled our first startup to $200,000, we had to learn the fundamentals of high-ticket sales.
I dabbled around some courses, influencers, and books…until I stumbled upon a questioning framework (Neuro-Emotional Probing Questions) that incorporates how therapists get patients to feel “safe”, open up, and relieve previous pain points. The objective is to self-direct themselves into beneficial, lasting change.
The mind often plays mental gymnastics to obstruct behavioral change, even when it can improve someone's life.
When I learned how selling was framed from this perspective, I was curious to learn about human psychology and habit reinforcement, bringing me to Dr.Kanaroji’s podcasts — a clinical psychiatrist who completed residency at Harvard Medical School.
I understood, at a deeper level, how the mind will respond to uncertainty, long-term commitment, previous failures, and risk aversion
I noticed my aptitudes started gravitating toward coaching, building trust, telling an authentic story, and empowering people to overcome objections to improve their personal goals.
Sure, this doesn’t fit the conventional paradigm of what would be taught under a class or fit a corporate job description, but it helped me close deals as large as $15k while I was 19 years old.
Another example: while designing a CRM workflow with basic automation tools — such as Zapier and Make integrations — the content, language, and ordering of each message, resource, and follow-up relied on a deep understanding of how the other person would react to it from a psychological perspective.
The sales and behavioral science frameworks influenced each intake form, email automation, and assumption throughout the entire system.
Intuition and design touched the entire system — despite not knowing how to code.
Growing up in the Bay Area, I observed a bias toward glamorizing STEM disciplines as “technical”, while downplaying the importance of other branches of knowledge.
Anything can become technical if someone applies a skill at a level of proficiency that most people couldn’t.
Obama’s public speaking ability is technical, even though most people view communication as a “soft skill”.
Most people can read, write, and speak; A trial litigator does the same thing.
They just do it a lot better than most people.
How to be contrarian Without Becoming Tucker Carlson
An idea that pushes against the norm does not guarantee it will be a good one.
Once you start thinking and creating differently, how do you ensure you don’t drift off the guardrails of common sense?
That’s arguably the important lesson I had to learn in the investment world: I’ve found myself overcomplicating the obvious, which is where needless mistakes have occurred.
Here’s the simplest sanity check I can offer: Disruptive thinking needs to be anchored under a thorough understanding of the status quo.
The more degrees of divergence someone undertakes, the firmer they need to grasp what they’re arguing against.
The entire process that PHD researchers follow is grounded in literature reviews: get situated in the current conversation before starting a new one.
Know why existing norms exist. What assumptions support it? What has been attempted before? Why do these ideas hold true? Under what conditions would they be false?
People who cheat this process often do so in pursuit of farming aura, as opposed to discovering the truth.
Stop searching for guaranteed outcomes.
I struggled with this one, a lot.
With higher levels of creative effort, copy-pasting the same inputs will not lead to the same output.
When I was in middle school, I wanted to dribble exactly like Kyrie Irving. I slowed down his highlights at 0.25x speed on YouTube, watching how he positioned his hips, where he shifted his weight from each leg, which direction his shoulders were placed, and the direction of his eye contact to deceive a defender.
I listened to his interviews about how he wrapped a plastic bag around a basketball to improve his handling control. I spent late nights in my garage, mimicking his routine.
However, I noticed when it came to live, in-game decisions, I couldn’t replicate his autonomous reactions. Knowing what fake, what footwork, and what crossover to use under a split-second change was something I failed to imitate.
It was his own feel for the game. By extension, his level of perception in basketball.
In the startup world, there isn’t a step-by-step, fool-proof method to building a unicorn company.
The path to discovering product market fit, prototyping a product, and selling to customers will be constructed differently for each person.
I’ve come to realize that after trying to mirror enough public speakers, polished debaters, basketball players, and entrepreneurs, there’s a level of creativity, effort, and iteration that each person has to go through individually to find their genius.
Authenticity as a Survival Mechanism
Regardless of any sanity checks or frameworks, you always assume a degree of risk by trusting your intuition above others.
It sounds scary and intimidating, but it's the only way to thrive in a world where you have no choice but to stand out.
The harder it is for your perception to become systemized, the less likely you are to get replaced.
It’s a game of balancing a seesaw of unconventional thinking while delivering value for others.
I can’t guarantee when a breakthrough is going to happen for me, or how big it’s going to be.
However, it would be unreasonable to believe I wouldn’t come out the other end better prepared for the future, as opposed to doing nothing.
A good friend of mine told me that a seasoned investor would flip a coin, even if its 51% in their favor and 49% against.
I stopped searching for “guaranteed outcomes”. Instead, I focused on taking calculated bets, looking for the highest expected payoffs.
The Emergence of Generalists
Specialization pays well.
I’ve been incredibly proud of my friends who have set themselves up for success at a young age.
The first words you would hear in a typical introduction are: “Investment banker at JP Morgan, a software engineer at Google, or hardware engineer at NVIDA”
However, if you dissect someone’s identity beyond their job title, everyone is still a generalist.
These are people I grew up with who watched DBZ, Naruto, and Full Metal Alchemist. They read books on investing, philosophy, and startups. They went on long hikes, learned new cooking recipes, and grew emotionally through romantic relationships.
The human experience is, and always has been, a game of becoming a generalist.
However, that playful, exploratory voice can often be silenced through the pressure of conforming to one area of focus.
In the pursuit of becoming technical, we lose sight of remaining free.
The reason I’m partially optimistic about the AI revolution is that it encourages an intricate exploration, reflection, and integration of interests that were previously shut off — helping us nurture our taste, perception, and creativity.
Social Optimism: The Curation of Community
When authentic taste is developed, the people attracted to your circle of influence will naturally appear more interesting, and likewise, will be more interested in you.
For the longest time in high school, I walked around campus without much self-esteem – walking back home every day and feeling chronically behind everyone else around me.
My classmates had these super sophisticated plans to get into Harvard from 9th grade; meanwhile, I was showing up to cross country practices in pajamas while tucking my long-sleeve shirt, running up a hill with a backpack on, and annoying my coach.
I had zero clue what I was doing with my life.
I had zero evidence suggesting I would be prepared to operate a company, much less scale it to 6 figures.
Some people laughed at me, at rightfully so, I didn’t have the most serious reputation. However, the vast majority were incredibly supportive.
If I had to go back in time, 10/10 times I would’ve joined Collegiate with Jesse and Ishaan again, even if it meant I had to endure a small degree of embarrassment or pushback.
In the same way financial bonds have a convex relationship with interest rates and prices, the same principles apply with authenticity: the upside of being yourself will be significantly higher, relative to the downside of people finding you strange.
There was a strange paradox in the Bay Area, where people would seek to overachieve but downplay the effort required to get there. This mindset didn’t apply to everyone, but it was noticeable.
Trying for the sake of trying was seen as distasteful.
However, as I had the freedom to curate more communities in college and the Residency, I became more satisfied.
People who do cool things aren’t too cool to care.
I guess everyone has their own flavor.
The wrong people will dilute it, the right ones will amplify it by adding their own seasoning.
Alright, I'm done with the food analogies; it's time for me to just put the fries back in the bag.