A week in -- Lots of positive responses. And some fair pushback.
The main criticism: "This is light on specifics. What's the actual solution?"
Here's the thing—that's partly the point.
The solution can't be handed to you in a blog post. It has to be discovered through exploration. Which means getting good at exploring.
And here's what makes this moment different: LLMs have collapsed the experience barrier. Tasks that used to require years of expertise to even attempt are now accessible to high schoolers. And because these tools are new, there's vast unexplored territory. The 20-year veteran has no map. Neither do you. That's the opportunity.
What does exploration look like?
Get uncomfortable. Go into domains where you have no background. The reflex to stay where you're credentialed is exactly what you need to overcome.
Tune your intuition. Develop a feel for where you might find what you want versus where you're wasting time. This is the essence of reinforcement learning, entrepreneurship, and life itself: learning from feedback. Fear, ego, and your existing lens get in the way. But like any muscle, it strengthens with use.
Geoffrey Hinton gave advice I wish I'd internalized earlier: follow your intuition young. Either you discover it's bad—and learn to improve it. Or you discover it's good—and you're doing something you're passionate about.
The old approach: "I have an engineering degree, a high GPA, these credentials. Who needs someone like me?"
The new approach: "I'm fascinated by video games and movies. That led me to vision models. I created short clips, stitched them together, noticed the models only produce disconnected montages. So I explored how language models could break stories into montage-friendly scenes. Here's what I built. Here's what could come next."
Take that to a company working on video synthesis. Maybe it's your edge. Maybe it's not, and you pivot to logistics or healthcare or climate.
Do this four or five times. I guarantee you'll be stronger, more employable, and a better founder if you ever start something.
One fair criticism: this sounds like doing a PhD. How do you study fundamentals and explore like this?
Something has to give. Maybe you skip the compilers course. Do more internships. Read trade magazines instead of sports magazines. Make room.
I wish I'd been more comfortable breaking rules and patterns when I was in college. I had freedom and curiosity, but stayed too safely within the lines.
Not everyone has equal capacity for experimentation—financial pressures, family obligations, real constraints. But for those who can create room, the question isn't whether to explore.
Stability didn't emerge from market forces, it was imposed on the market by anti-trust regulation, taxation of extremely high incomes, union activity and a culture suspicious of extreme wealth.
It may be there is no going back to a world where an average person can expect a good life. That is the world you are describing. Because the exceptional people 'held back' by the stable path are vastly outnumbered by the mediocre who were uplifted.
But we should recognize building this world was a political project, as was its undoing
Great read. Seeing quite a few younger people also opting for skilled trades, hoping to start their own companies. If robots ever get good enough, they'll hire them too.
I enjoyed reading this, thanks Amit. I coach technology professionals in isolating and strengthening their engineering mindset muscles. “Leaning into the exposure” is a skill and not a character trait and this skill is going to become more valuable with the shifts the industry is going through.
Read this as part of my morning read and it hit the nail on the head! I have a teenager and am wondering what skills, behaviours will be the key for him to succeed in this new world! Our path already isn't working. What I struggle with is how to guide & coach my teenager on getting ready for the real world :)
Thanks for the comment, Abhishek! I have a teenager as well, and she is deep into coding competitions, debate, and robotics. We don't know if these will be the exact things that will help her in life, but the goal is for her to learn to work hard at something, learn to get world-class at something, and those skills should always be transferable.
There's a major gap in the modern market feedback loop incentivizing doing something in the big space of nothing where novel will continuously emerges and presents its bright, shiny new self in unpredictable ways and forms. The gap is measurable in so many observable dysfunctions - stimming, indulging in any number of modern ways to get net-negative dopamine hits, unhealthy lifestyle habits, standard issue boredom, valuable asset neglect and deterioration. Now that generally being smart is a very inflated currency, maybe the talented ones will take a second to look around and think about why it's so hard to just make life cool, and whether all the ways of manufacturing scarcity, when cultivating abundance is the only way to sustain anything good in life, was ever worth it in the first place. Let's just lean into a new way of conceiving of contribution and distribution and get going :)
A week in -- Lots of positive responses. And some fair pushback.
The main criticism: "This is light on specifics. What's the actual solution?"
Here's the thing—that's partly the point.
The solution can't be handed to you in a blog post. It has to be discovered through exploration. Which means getting good at exploring.
And here's what makes this moment different: LLMs have collapsed the experience barrier. Tasks that used to require years of expertise to even attempt are now accessible to high schoolers. And because these tools are new, there's vast unexplored territory. The 20-year veteran has no map. Neither do you. That's the opportunity.
What does exploration look like?
Get uncomfortable. Go into domains where you have no background. The reflex to stay where you're credentialed is exactly what you need to overcome.
Tune your intuition. Develop a feel for where you might find what you want versus where you're wasting time. This is the essence of reinforcement learning, entrepreneurship, and life itself: learning from feedback. Fear, ego, and your existing lens get in the way. But like any muscle, it strengthens with use.
Geoffrey Hinton gave advice I wish I'd internalized earlier: follow your intuition young. Either you discover it's bad—and learn to improve it. Or you discover it's good—and you're doing something you're passionate about.
The old approach: "I have an engineering degree, a high GPA, these credentials. Who needs someone like me?"
The new approach: "I'm fascinated by video games and movies. That led me to vision models. I created short clips, stitched them together, noticed the models only produce disconnected montages. So I explored how language models could break stories into montage-friendly scenes. Here's what I built. Here's what could come next."
Take that to a company working on video synthesis. Maybe it's your edge. Maybe it's not, and you pivot to logistics or healthcare or climate.
Do this four or five times. I guarantee you'll be stronger, more employable, and a better founder if you ever start something.
One fair criticism: this sounds like doing a PhD. How do you study fundamentals and explore like this?
Something has to give. Maybe you skip the compilers course. Do more internships. Read trade magazines instead of sports magazines. Make room.
I wish I'd been more comfortable breaking rules and patterns when I was in college. I had freedom and curiosity, but stayed too safely within the lines.
Not everyone has equal capacity for experimentation—financial pressures, family obligations, real constraints. But for those who can create room, the question isn't whether to explore.
It's how quickly you start.
Stability didn't emerge from market forces, it was imposed on the market by anti-trust regulation, taxation of extremely high incomes, union activity and a culture suspicious of extreme wealth.
It may be there is no going back to a world where an average person can expect a good life. That is the world you are describing. Because the exceptional people 'held back' by the stable path are vastly outnumbered by the mediocre who were uplifted.
But we should recognize building this world was a political project, as was its undoing
Great read. Seeing quite a few younger people also opting for skilled trades, hoping to start their own companies. If robots ever get good enough, they'll hire them too.
The Economist just dropped a great article on the trades as well: https://www.economist.com/international/2025/12/18/ditch-textbooks-and-learn-how-to-use-a-wrench-to-ai-proof-your-job
I enjoyed reading this, thanks Amit. I coach technology professionals in isolating and strengthening their engineering mindset muscles. “Leaning into the exposure” is a skill and not a character trait and this skill is going to become more valuable with the shifts the industry is going through.
I will be forwarding this to a few folks, thanks!
Read this as part of my morning read and it hit the nail on the head! I have a teenager and am wondering what skills, behaviours will be the key for him to succeed in this new world! Our path already isn't working. What I struggle with is how to guide & coach my teenager on getting ready for the real world :)
Thanks for the comment, Abhishek! I have a teenager as well, and she is deep into coding competitions, debate, and robotics. We don't know if these will be the exact things that will help her in life, but the goal is for her to learn to work hard at something, learn to get world-class at something, and those skills should always be transferable.
There's a major gap in the modern market feedback loop incentivizing doing something in the big space of nothing where novel will continuously emerges and presents its bright, shiny new self in unpredictable ways and forms. The gap is measurable in so many observable dysfunctions - stimming, indulging in any number of modern ways to get net-negative dopamine hits, unhealthy lifestyle habits, standard issue boredom, valuable asset neglect and deterioration. Now that generally being smart is a very inflated currency, maybe the talented ones will take a second to look around and think about why it's so hard to just make life cool, and whether all the ways of manufacturing scarcity, when cultivating abundance is the only way to sustain anything good in life, was ever worth it in the first place. Let's just lean into a new way of conceiving of contribution and distribution and get going :)