the only skill that matters

Hey 👋

I’m listening to the hum of the heater in the air ducts, feeling the warmth of my first cup of coffee as it settles in my stomach. I’ve wiped the sleep way from my eyes more than a few times.

It’s 6:13 am, and I’m thinking about leverage.

Twenty years ago, a key form of leverage came from access: the people you knew, the school you went to, the city you grew up in, the amount of money in your Mom and Dad’s bank account. This determined your available opportunities.

Today, with the adoption of the internet, access barriers have decreased. You can learn anything and reach anyone on social media, including celebrities, politicians, professors, scientists, millionaires, and billionaires.

Access is no longer the constraint.

We now live in a world of seemingly infinite opportunities:

• New business models

• AI tech arriving every week

• New “make money online” methods

There’s no shortage of paths to take. In fact, there are too many. I’m sure you’ve felt that low grade anxiety of “missing out” or wondering if you’re working on the right thing.

I have - we all have.

So, if opportunity access is no longer the primary point of leverage, what is?

It’s opportunity filtering.

In other words, how you detect and select to filter out the noise is now the ultimate lever.

You can’t take advantage of a great opportunity if you’re unable to detect it in the noise of a million good opportunities. And once you’ve detected it, you must be able to train your focus on it while saying “no” to opportunities afterwards, including other great opportunities.

When noise is perceptibly infinite, detection and selection become a meta-skill. They form the substructure of all other leverage.

If you lack detection and selection skills, everything downstream gets messed up too. Errors here become a tax on great opportunities you couldn’t see because your attention was already spent elsewhere.

The good news is that detection and selection are skills that can be trained, and in a world where everyone has access to everything, they might be the only skills that matter.

-Michael