Value Unspoken
Sarah Tucker in the Wall Street Journal on The High Cost of Thinking for Free🔒:
There are moments in life when one realizes one has accidentally become an unpaid educational resource for highly remunerated people.[...]
And here lies the uncomfortable truth: Value unspoken is value undefined.
One of the most important lessons in professional life is that if you do not define the value of your work, clearly, someone else will define it for you. Often downward.
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Highly intelligent people often become extremely efficient at operating within established systems while remaining surprisingly blind to alternative framings.
As AI expands and traditional career structures fragment, more people will increasingly operate across multiple disciplines...this means understanding one's own value becomes one of the most important future skills of all.
I'd go further. It becomes the skill.
a16z's Justine Moore on AI Micro Dramas, Generative Media, and the Future of Creativity:
So, one of my takes is that AI agents are going to be particularly powerful for individual creators and small businesses, just because they're so much more constrained time-wise and resource-wise.And it's going to be a massive step function improvement for them.
The agents give you the step function.
Defining the value is still your job. So is capturing it.