The Texture of a Career
I’ve never been shy of working hard nor saw it as a big deal, just the baseline. Some of the projects I’ve worked on have demanded some crazy hours and relentless commitment, but that’s the job. Over the years I’ve often said the trick is to build a big enough surface area for luck to do its part. The more people you meet, the more ideas you chase, the more projects you say yes to, the more opportunities luck has to find you.
And popped up in chats last month in Paris, I found myself in a few rooms, and bars, with friends and collaborators with decades of experience and contacts. The kind that doesn’t live in a prompt or skill, we will come back to this. We kept coming back to the same question, and it had nothing to do with whether experience still matters, we all felt it did, the question was whether the market still recognised its value.
As AI and other systems become part of everyday workflows, skills that once took years to master are being packaged into prompts/skills and products. The tools flatten the perceived distance between someone with twenty odd years of judgement and someone with twenty minutes and a well-written prompt. Competence is becoming easier to produce, and inevitably the market begins to value it differently.
Which brings me back to will.
Will without skill is just persistence and skill without will eventually runs out of steam. The real advantage is when the two compound over time.
Because what AI can’t compress is everything that happens around the work. It can’t recreate the trust built over years of fashion weeks, launches, collaborations, side quests, chats in guest list queues, late-night conversations and bigger brand plays where a personal relationship pushed an idea over the line, or straight up pulled a favour to get a killer talent . It can’t replicate judgement earned through mistakes, or the instinct that tells you to ignore the data and trust the room or your gut, and it still can’t manufacture reputation or straight up curiosity.
I reckon this leaves us with three paths.
The first belongs to the OGs who have spent years building relevance, trust and relationships. Their advantage is what they know, who they know, and what they’ve lived through. The smartest won’t resist these new tools, they’ll use and train them to amplify everything they’ve already built.
Virgil Abloh understood this instinctively. I saw it back in the day while collaborating on Nike’s The Ten launch. He wasn’t interested in staying within one discipline or one generation. He connected people who might never have shared a room, bringing together figures like Neville Brody, Michèle Lamy, A$AP Nast, Eddie Peake and Grace Wales Bonner. Fashion, art, music, design and culture all fed each other. That was cultural cross-pollination, and it became one of his greatest strengths.
The second path belongs to a younger generation who are native to these tools. They’re moving faster, experimenting more freely and breaking through because the barriers to making have collapsed - they’re not waiting for permission.
The third rail is the one that excites me most, and probably the one brands should be investing in.
It’s where experience meets experimentation, where judgement meets speed, where mentorship flows both ways. Experienced creatives pass on context, relationships and instinct, while younger creatives introduce new tools, behaviours and ways of thinking. That’s an exchange, and a genuinely generative one.
Chip Conley once said something that has stuck with me and i reference it alot: “Don’t be the most interesting person in the room. Be the most interested.”
And people I admire most already work like this and some grew up in an analogue world and are now producing incredible work with AI because they’ve never stopped learning. At the same time, I’m seeing younger creatives actively seek out experienced designers, strategists and makers because they understand that taste, judgement and trust can’t be downloaded.
The future belongs to the people who combine will, skill, curiosity and relationships, keep building their surface area, and never stop learning from the people around them.