You Were Never Paid to Be Yourself

If you are the one doing the work, read this because the part of your job you were trained to be is getting cheaper every month, and the part you were never paid for is about to matter more than anything on your résumé.

If you lead a team or a company, read this because the people you organized to be repeatable are carrying the one thing your competitors cannot copy, and the deal you built with them was never designed to ask for it.

→ Join me for my next LinkedIn Live: Wednesday, Sep. 30 at 12:00 PM ET.

Last year I did a fireside chat at Ancestry International. Near the end, someone early in their career asked me a question.

"If the machines are going to come and do the machine work," they said, "if they are output machines of infinite scale, moving at the speed of light, with the ability to access all of human knowledge in the blink of an eye, what's your advice to me?"

I get asked that question all the time.

I get it from people much later in their careers. I get it from parents, worried about kids who are about to choose what to study, or who can already see graduation on the horizon.

My answer is always the same.

But to understand the answer, you have to start with a deal you probably do not remember making.

You built a version of yourself for work.

Steady. Consistent. Easy to plan around. Easy to plug in.

You became a product.

You got very good at being it.

And it paid.

You were trained and incentivized to be the repeatable part. To be machine-like. To be the cog that fit the corporate machine.

It made sense. For most of the last century, every company was incentivized to be an assembly line algorithm. The decisions were made upstream. The steps were defined before the work ever reached you. Your value was how reliably you ran them. That is the execution economy: scale and repetition, built around a playbook someone else wrote.

So they asked you to become the machine.

And you said yes.

This was not oppression. It was a deal, and both sides entered it willingly. The terms were simple: plug into the machine by becoming the machine. And it paid. It paid in compensation. It paid in the career ladder. It paid in status.

What was the cost?

The cost was you.

Your thinking. Your creativity, your curiosity, your imagination.

The corporate machine had no use for them, so it never asked for them. Nothing and nobody designed for them. Nothing and nobody incentivized them. The schooling that prepared you for the work was shaped like a factory, and so was the work.

Nobody set out to suppress any of it. It just never showed up on the invoice.

So it receded. Not all at once. Quietly, over years, the way anything recedes when nothing asks for it. For most of us it is still there. We just stopped using it. It went dormant.

You were paid to be the machine.

Here is what changed.

Every valuable thing runs the same cycle. Someone innovates it. Everyone else copies it. Then it gets commoditized, and its price falls toward zero.

Execution used to be the hard part. It was scarce, so it was valuable. That is why you were paid for it.

Now AI copies it and commoditizes it. The repeatable part of your work, the part you were trained to be, is trending to free. Not free today, and not for every job. But trending there, and nothing is stopping the slide.

AI is the ultimate possibility machine. It is also the ultimate copy and commoditization machine. Same tool. Both directions. At once.

And free is not valuable.

Scarcity drives value. When the price of one thing collapses, the value does not disappear. It moves to whatever did not go to zero.

So what did not go to zero?

The part yesterday's deal had no use for. The part everyone talked about and nobody organized around. Nobody incentivized it. Nobody paid for it.

In Edition 6 I wrote about the two engines every company runs. "The execution engine harvests today's value. The regenerative engine creates Tomorrow's value."

The execution engine used to need you. It needed you as the machine.

It does not anymore. The machine is the machine now.

The regenerative engine is where you are needed. And the regenerative engine runs on exactly what the execution engine never wanted: you, as yourself. Your thinking. Your curiosity, which asks the question nobody has asked yet. Your imagination, which sees what nobody has seen yet. Your creativity, which makes the thing nobody has made yet.

Yesterday's deal had no use for your thinking.

Tomorrow's deal requires what Yesterday's didn't.

You have heard the sentence. Probably more than once this month.

"AI won't take your job. Someone using AI will."

It is wrong. Or at least badly incomplete.

Someone using AI can produce a mountain of work at industrial speed. A lot of it will be what I called human slop: work shipped on the confidence the tool lent you, not the competence you earned. Using AI is not the differentiator. Using AI is table stakes.

The differentiator is orientation.

Which brings me back to that fireside, and the answer I give every time.

Know yourself. Be yourself. Show up as yourself.

Said like that, I know it sounds like a greeting card. It is also the most economically literal advice I have.

The person using AI who knows themselves, is themselves and shows up as themselves has a greater probability of creating economic value. Not a guarantee. A greater probability. Because they are the only ones bringing the part that is not going to zero. The part that is scarce. Themselves.

They are an n of one. So are you.

In Edition 9 I called AI an exoskeleton, machinery you can wear, and wrote about the formula between a company and its people. This formula is between you and the exoskeleton. And it runs whether you ever leave your company or not.

Here is the formula.

Put the repeatable part, the machine version of you, inside, and you get the repeatable part faster. But that part of you is going to zero.

Put the full you, the real you, inside, your thinking, your curiosity, your imagination, and you get you, amplified.

That is the scarce thing. That is the thing whose value is going up.

The exoskeleton is not the value. It is the multiplier. Which leaves only one real question: what are you putting inside it? The part of you that is going to zero, or the part only you can bring?

Anyone can wear it. Wearing it is not the achievement. Inhabiting it is. Being fully yourself inside it, so it works for you and not against you.

"Be yourself" is worthless advice until you can be caught not doing it.

So here is where you get caught. In the work itself.

Look at the last thing you made. The deck. The memo. The code. The campaign. The recommendation you sent up the chain.

Did your thinking sculpt it? Is it in there, shaping it, travelling with it?

Or could it have come from anyone?

That is the one check the machine cannot run for you. Not because the machine is not smart enough. Because the check is not a capability. It cannot be codified. You, the real you, the thinking you, cannot be codified.

It is a verdict.

And only you can deliver it.

There used to be a different question, and it came at the front of the work. Should I make this at all? When making was expensive, that question was enough, because cost did the filtering for you. You could not afford to make everything, so you did not.

Execution is heading to free. The question at the front filters almost nothing now.

The question that matters now comes after the work exists.

It does not need a new process. It does not need a committee. It needs an honest self-assessment. It needs to be acknowledged, and applied.

And when the honest answer is no, the work does not go out.

So how do you know whether you are in it?

The bar is conviction, not readiness. Not "is this good enough yet?" But "is this what I think needs to exist?"

The economics are simple. What is yours is scarce. What is scarce is valuable. So you have to travel with the work. Your thinking has to be embedded in it. If it is not, the work is generic. One of the many.

And the many are trending to free.

There are three ways I check.

The first is my own attention. If somebody else had put this out into the world, would it get my attention? Your attention is the only attention you have complete access to. That makes it the only calibrated instrument you own. Use it on your own work before you ask anyone else to spend theirs.

The second is an old entrepreneur's rule. Solve a problem you actually have. If it solves yours, it has a real chance of solving someone else's.

The third is how you defend it. Imagine someone pushes back on the work. What do you reach for?

Do you say: that's how I was taught?

That's how it's done?

That's the format?

If your only defense is a ready-made answer, or pointing to the work of others, your thinking did not travel with the work.

You are your own test market. And you have to be the most demanding customer of what you make.

One more thing, because some people will read this as permission never to ship anything.

This is not perfectionism. Holding work back because it is not finished is not what I mean. Holding it back because you are not in it is.

You cannot run any of those checks without an instrument.

The instrument is you.

That is all "know yourself" means here. Owning the instrument. Knowing what you actually think, what you are curious about, what you believe needs to exist, well enough to notice when it is missing from your own work.

It is not a virtue. It is a prerequisite.

It is also what lets you bring your thinking, your creativity, your curiosity and your imagination forward. Otherwise you are borrowing them from others.

And it is expensive. It is expensive because yesterday's deal trained it out of you. Years of bringing the useful, machine-like parts to work and leaving the rest to go dormant. Getting it back is work.

You might be thinking: my boss doesn't want my thinking, my creativity, my curiosity, my imagination. My boss wants the deliverable.

Under yesterday's deal, that was true. It is not true anymore.

Your company is facing the same headwind you are. Its repeatable part is going the same way. The only way it can stand apart now is through the part of its people that is not a commodity. Yesterday's deal does not serve your employer anymore either.

None of this guarantees you an audience. Being yourself does not promise that anyone will notice. It only raises the probability. But it is the only thing left that does.

Right now I have a white paper about thinking. I have been working on it for a while. I have not put it out into the world.

It is not that it isn't finished. It is that it isn't fully mine yet.

I have not given it the full breadth and depth of my thinking. I am still sculpting it. I am still following strands of curiosity. I am still working out how to express it, and how to connect it to ideas already out in the world. My imagination has more to offer it.

It would be fair to ask whether holding it back is a lack of courage.

It is not. It is conviction. The bar has not been met yet.

I know it has not been met because I know myself. I am being myself. I am showing up as myself. I demand that of myself. That is my bar.

I am not competing with everyone else who is using AI. I am competing with myself, and my own bar.

Nobody will ever see the versions I did not send. Nobody will credit me for them. The same is true of everything you hold back: work nobody will ever see, and nobody will ever credit you for.

And holding it back will still have been the most important decision you made about it.

So stop asking whether your work is good enough.

Start asking, "Am I in this?"

That is what I am watching for Tomorrow.

- Nish

On my next LinkedIn Live, Wednesday, Sep. 30 at 12:00 PM ET, I'm going deeper on three things I left out of this edition: