When The Pool Gets Crowded

The kid who wins swimming age champion isn't always the fastest swimmer in the year.

Sometimes it's the kid who shows up for every race. Fourth in the 50m. Second in the 100m. Second in the 200m. First in the 800m. Competes in breaststroke and butterfly too.

The specialists beat him in almost every single race. He still walks away with the trophy.

This was me at 16. And it turned out to be a pattern.

I was never the best at anything. Good at maths, capable at sport, decent at art. I'd often place but rarely win.

For years I thought that was a problem. It became my career.

I write, design, edit video, consult on marketing. I can take an idea and ship it before most teams have finished their meeting. Reasonably good at all of it. Best at none of it.

For over 20 years, that was my moat. The ability to move between disciplines, ship faster, compound across fields. The specialists were better in any single lane. While I was able to swim the whole meet.

Then AI arrived. And the moat drained overnight.

Anyone can write now. Anyone can design. Anyone can make videos. The skills are no longer the asset.

What's left is the harder thing. Knowing which idea is worth making. Knowing when something is done. Knowing the difference between clever and clear, between busy and useful, between a thing that looks finished and a thing that's actually finished.

That's taste. And you can't get it from a tool. It comes from years of effort and practice. From thousands of small judgments earned by doing the work and watching what lands.

At sixteen, I learned the trophy goes to the kid who keeps showing up. Thirty years on, the lesson hasn't changed.

The pool’s just more full of people who haven’t done the laps.

* * * * *

Three things that happened that inspired this week’s blog:

1. I looked through hundreds of unpublished pieces sitting in my Keep app. AI can't tell me which ones should never be published. That instinct feels like the skill.

2. I've been building apps with Claude Code lately. It feels effortless. But when I show someone the process, their eyes glaze over the second I open the terminal. The reason I can use it at all is that I learned Apple BASIC on a IIe when I was 13. Then Active Server Pages in the 90s. Then Dreamweaver and VBScript. The tool is new. The thirty years underneath it aren't.

3. I've written over a hundred newsletters. I still get the small pause before hitting send. That pause is taste asking one more time if this is the version worth shipping. For now, that's still a very human thing.