In January I wrote about identity and AI. I called it grief. People aren’t stubborn when they resist new tools, I said. They’re mourning a version of themselves that used to be worth something.
I still believe that. But I want to come back to it with numbers, because the grief is warranted in a way I didn’t fully understand three months ago.
Here is what the research shows.
The premise that held for a hundred years
Brooke Macnamara’s meta-analysis of thousands of studies found that deliberate practice explains only 18% of the variance in sports performance. 21% in music. 26% in games. The 10,000-hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made famous was always a misread of Anders Ericsson’s work. Time was never the real bottleneck. It was just our best available proxy for something we couldn’t quite name.
For decades we told a story about competence. Suffering is the price, the story said. You earn it the honest way, sitting with the material for long enough that it becomes part of you. Most of us organised our careers inside that premise. Some of us organised our self-worth around it.
Then 2023 happened.
The curve flattened from below
Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond studied 5,172 customer support agents who’d been given a generative AI assistant. The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025. Productivity went up 15% on average. But the gain wasn’t evenly distributed. Less-experienced workers improved both speed and quality. Dramatically. The most experienced ones saw almost nothing.
The tool flattened the curve from below.
That is a very specific kind of sentence. Read it again.
Junior workers performed like seniors. Seniors performed like seniors. The gap collapsed. Thirty years of earned expertise was worth less than it was two years ago, and the people who had less to unlearn were moving fastest.
This is why the floor feels like it moved. Because it actually did. Measurably. In a peer-reviewed journal.
The adoption curve has no reference class
The St. Louis Fed reported last year that 40% of US adults used generative AI within two years of ChatGPT’s release. Personal computers took three years to hit 20%. Smartphones took about the same.
There is no technology in modern economic history with an adoption curve that looks like this. We are all living through something for which we have no reference class, and the research is only just starting to catch up.
Dillon, Jaffe, Immorlica and Stanton published a six-month randomised field experiment in 2025. Six thousand knowledge workers across 56 large firms, half given Microsoft Copilot. The finding: gains happened, but only where workers were willing to rewire how they worked. The tool alone didn’t help.
This is the quiet part most commentary misses. The AI isn’t doing the work for you. It’s changing what “doing the work” means. And that change lands differently depending on how much you’ve invested in the old meaning.
So what do you do with this?
If you spent your twenties and thirties accumulating the kind of knowledge that’s now a prompt, the question is genuine and uncomfortable.
I don’t have a clean answer. But three things are becoming clear to me.
First: the skills are repriced, not worthless. I spent years learning how to shape a digital transformation. That knowledge isn’t gone. It’s moved. The work now is having the taste to judge the output, and knowing which pieces to wire to which tool. Judgement is the bottleneck now, not memory. People with the deepest judgement are still winning. They’re just not winning by carrying facts in their head.
Second: the people still insisting on the old rule — that you have to suffer to be worth something — are not going to win this argument. The Microsoft/HBS study is clear. Only the workers who accepted the new premise pulled ahead. The ones who treated the tool as a threat and worked around it saw no gains.
Third, and this is the part I keep coming back to: the honest thing to say is that most of us didn’t earn the current advantage. We just showed up. We kept playing with the tools after most people stopped being curious. That’s the whole story.
Which means I can’t take credit the old way. But I also can’t hide anymore. Everyone’s excuse just expired.
Where this leaves us
The floor moved. Research says so. Macnamara’s numbers say time was never the moat. Brynjolfsson’s study says the curve flattened. The St. Louis Fed says adoption has no historical analog. Dillon’s RCT says the tool rewards the willing, not the experienced.
And the only useful question now is whether you want to keep standing where it used to be.
🌈
MAKE YOUR CASE.