When I started at HubSpot, I joined everyone newly hired to the customer success team for a two-week stint of product training. The culmination was a presentation, where we had to demonstrate a fully built marketing effort for a fake business using HubSpot's marketing software. We had to configure a website, set up forms, create some email automations, and, if I recall, publish some social posts. The big boss of product training would review our setups and pass (or fail!) us at the end of the first two weeks. Nothing focuses the mind like a real deadline—when we learned that we had to pass the test, we focused intently on the product training team's workshops.More than a few folks in my cohort had a lot of trouble coming up with the written marketing materials: website pages, blog posts, and emails. On the other hand, I had no trouble reeling off endless copy. I had just wrapped up two years at a marketing agency and prior to that five as a non-profit marketer: I was very used to drumming up copy to fill a slice of the internet with vaguely interesting things to read, or, more accurately, vaguely readable things. My colleagues thanked me profusely when they were able to populate their HubSpot-hosted blogs with decent copy about how to pick a decent wedding officiant, dog watcher, and travel planner. When we all passed our product training tests, we realized that the rigamarole was mostly in order for us to pay attention. I thought it was funny they thought it wild that I was able to generate a few paragraphs in a few minutes. It didn't seem like a skill as the paragraphs didn't seem worth reading.
In terms of writing, I had collected two lessons: the first, from my barely-attained liberal arts degree, was the ability to think enough to write something (anything, just 9.5 pages to pass the class!); a lesson from graduate school and work thereafter was the importance of focusing enough to edit something I'd written into something worth reading. You've heard me yammer on about editing before. I can summarize my big thought as: editing is vital. It's what separates a website full of copy made to pass the test from a website that educates and motivates real people to make good decisions. The ability to edit is a sort of alchemy between the ability to think and to communicate. There are more than a few workable definitions of knowledge work: Peter Drucker coined the term to describe the people who process information and apply their knowledge to make money; more recently, Shane Parrish thinks it is generating decisions while Todd Henry defines it as generating ideas. These latter two are more functional definitions and the sort that thin as knowledge worker tools get more powerful. What does it mean to be a knowledge worker when the tool one uses comes up with infinite ideas or when you delegate decisions to a machine?
I'm not arguing a luddite position here—just that the things we used to prize in knowledge work perhaps are no longer scarce. Coming up with a bunch of ideas really quick isn't scarce; neither is generating copy. When I was hunting for a job, from over my shoulder, a guy who had been watching me edit my resume in a Panera Bread told me that I should, "learn to code. Mobile apps." For a while I thought that maybe I was missing a key skill. But being a below-average coder isn't scarce (for that matter, it probably never was). What does the guy in the Panera tell the resume-editing 20-something now? What is scarce?
For this week's reading, I am bringing you three essays illustrating what I think it is scarce in knowledge work and which shed some light on where things might be heading. Enjoy the reading and let me know what you think.
Reading
Your Next Favorite App? The One You Make Yourself.
‘Vibe coding’ with new AI tools makes it possible for just about anyone to create personalized apps—no programming required.
Impact, agency, and taste
I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart my coworkers who’ve done the best work. Successful individuals take accountability for their goals and focus on finding effective solutions, often through data analysis and reflection.
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.