11 - The Library

For most of my career, I was paid to know things.

Not just to do things. To know them.

How deals work. Why pipelines collapse. What good looks like in a sales team that's starting to drift. I carried it all. Built it up over years. Kept adding to it.

That library was the asset.

When a CEO called, I could walk in and see the problem inside ten minutes.

Not because I was clever.

Because I had pattern.

Because I had seen it before.

Because I remembered.

The library opened doors. The library justified the rate. The library was the thing.

Then something shifted.

I started using AI. Not as a tool. As a thinking partner. And I noticed something I didn't expect.

A lot of what I thought was insight was actually retrieval.

I wasn't always thinking. I was often reciting. Pulling from the library. Delivering the known answer to the familiar problem.

And the library — the one I spent twenty-five years building — it can be replicated now. Not perfectly. But well enough to make you pause.

So here's the thing I keep sitting with.

If the value was in the recall, and the recall is no longer rare — what's left?

I don't have a clean answer.

But I notice the question unsettles people who've been around a long time more than it unsettles people who haven't.

The ones who aren't unsettled?

They were never relying on the library to begin with.

The asset they built was imagination. The ability to see what isn't there yet. To connect things that haven't been connected. To ask the question nobody thought to ask.

That was always harder to replicate.

It still is. Or at least for now.

God knows where this AI world takes us in the next few years.