> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.

Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."

Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".

I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.

Nothing useful.

So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.

While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.

But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.