For decades, career success had one formula: know more than everyone else. That's dead.
The shift: AI has turned information into a commodity. Being the smartest person in the room used to be the whole game — now it barely matters, because whatever you know today may be outdated by tomorrow.
What replaces it: Judgment. Not "what do you know" but "can you make sense of what's in front of you." Grant points to three specific muscles:
- Spotting patterns across noise
- Synthesizing scattered, contradictory information
- Telling credible sources from junk
The one thing AI still can't do: Turn a pile of information into a story that sticks — something memorable, emotionally resonant, pithy. Grant's take: human creativity is moving away from generating ideas and toward selecting and shaping them.
The trap to avoid: "Threat rigidity" — clinging harder to your current expertise because it feels like the last safe thing you own. Grant's warning: whatever skill feels bulletproof right now might look irrelevant in three months.
Two habits Grant actually practices:
- Run a weekly experiment. Pick one small change, test it, learn, adjust. Example: rotate who runs your team meeting so you're not stuck hearing the same voice every time.
- Call instead of email. People are getting numb to written messages. Grant's betting that a real phone call — no calendar invite, no Zoom — builds a different kind of trust and surfaces different ideas.
If your boss is stuck in the past: Don't pitch one idea and ask for a yes/no. Bring three options and ask which one they'd prioritize. Framing it as their efficiency win — and giving them a menu instead of a verdict — shifts them from "reasons to reject" into "which one do I like."