10,000+ Hours

Hearing these phrases on short clips more than once recently, spoken by the apparent leader of the free world, has jarred me.

- You don’t know anything about …

- What do you know about [insert deflection] anyway?

- You know nothing!

He is an archetype, not an exception. The performer who declares authority he never earned. You meet the smaller version every day in the feed, the expert who is an expert because they say so. The president is only the loudest.

Many of us, by contrast, have spent years developing deep expertise in our fields, while he has become skilled in diminishing, dismissing, and deflecting.

His insistence on gaslighting is not unique to him, but he exemplifies the deeper structural and systemic problems remarkably well.

Many of us have spent well beyond our 10,000+ hours learning, practicing, and applying what we have come to deeply know.

We serve our clients, constituents, and colleagues from that vantage point.

We own our expertise and have earned it fair and square, brick by brick.

We chose not to be generalists. As a result, we became futurists, specialists, artists, craftspeople, and "outliers" to the so-called rules of how things "are supposed to work." We were not persuaded by convention.

We have been preparing since at least the 90s for this decade. For the era change. The breakdown. The last gasps of a world holding microphones, looking into monitors, dictating to us, with bloated agency and imaginary authority "what we don't know," "should be," or "what we need to know."

All the while, those delivering these messages have become increasingly unqualified to speak with any authority on most things.

The world we are entering is not just a swap out of the old, top-down, imperial structures.

No.

It is the new world we have been envisioning, leading from, and building since we first saw its flicker in the 90s. A world where we each lead from our skill, knowing, creativity, and the depth of our expertise. Our mastery, curated, honed, refined, and shaped like sea glass over years of weathering, sets us apart from corporate coggery and late-stage, normed bloviation.

Our knowing is born from a non-negotiable commitment to a deeper set of principles and truths, not conformity or performance.

We invested those 10,000+ hours to become non-obedient rather than obedient, unquiet rather than silenced, guided by the conviction to serve what we value, not measured against values projected onto us from an externalised vision and mass snake charming.

Pretending to value such things as word salads, the bizarrely valued vanity metric, had little appeal. We chased fewer shiny pennies, and we said "no" to the tiny boxes.

Our 10,000+ hour commitments were deliberate decisions to engage our minds and live our creativity as a way of operating. As builders, crafters, designers, programmers, creators, and innovators, we made sometimes risky, aka "outlier," decisions to follow our art rather than be trapped, controlled, or bound by the preferred, systemic intellectual or creative generalism. The same generalism that feels threatened, and therefore systemically entitled to diminish, deny, and deflect out of fear and ignorance.

Our 10,000+ hours have now become 20,000+, 30,000+, and 40,000+.

Foresight meets hindsight.

Years spent operating outside, rather than inside, the systems have sharpened our swords to carve this next stone, an era-defining opportunity to reinvent what matters. Not just tweaking edges or patching broken designs, but elevating and expanding intelligence itself.

The Machine can now do "clever." Clever is both actual and cheeky. It too can bloviate. Its abilities can be useful. Let the masses now be freed to do the valuable, the meaningful, and the worthy. To evolve the future.

Some are panicking. Honing craft is hard. It is a commitment. It requires skin in the game. Effort. Learning. Not gaming.

Every era change arrives with the same overture, a chorus of fear about the new thing. The printing press. The internet. Now the Machine. The performers of authority always lead the chorus, because a frightened person will not claim their mastery, and mastery is what threatens the fake and the performative.

This future needs true craftspeople. Weavers of passion, know-how, experience, expertise, sewing dreams, and threading knowledge into work, products, solutions, and innovations that are real and purposeful to advance, not limit, humanity.

This future will not have as much need for the packagers of promises, managers of people, or ad sellers. The Machine has that covered now.

This wave feels evolutionarily different from the ones before. This one may eject us out of the mechanical. Free us from the rote, if we choose. Permit us to know without so much interference, overlording, and dictation.

We may finally break from the old, repetitive, masked system designs and find our agency, sovereignty, craft, and creativity, ourselves.

The systems of old want you small.

It takes your worth, your identity, your value, your agency, and hands back a smaller you to manage.

It pushes you to doubt what you know, insisting you need what it peddles as truth. Without it, you do not amount to anything. It hopes you believe all this.

Now, everyone can (and may have to) stay true to their 10,000+ hours pursuits. Own their knowing. Find answers and build expertise without barriers.

The televised gaslighting, diminishing, and fear-mongering are the final act of those trying to maintain control, continue oppression, and perpetuate subjugation. Or, at the very least, trying to provoke you to stop accepting the bullshit.

Why, in fact, would anyone accept these signals?

Because gaslighting, whitewashing, and the preservation of ignorance maintain the status quo. Managed obedience is normalised. They are active interferences with evolutionary change, humanity's development, and our progress into higher states of understanding and knowing. We agree to them by accepting the snake charms, even rewarding them with the highest elected office in the free world.

So, instead of fearing the Machine, become an expert in how to use it wisely. Invest your 10,000+ hours to build your business, craft, discipline, practice, and art. Stop listening to the media telling you "you don't know," "be afraid," or "they're coming to take your job."

You know plenty. Besides, this evolution will be far less about knowing and far more about moving on a dime, fast change, prescient thinking, originality, and never-before-seen innovations.

The Machine is an instrument and resource to raise the baseline upon which this phase of evolution will accelerate.

It is not a savior, oracle, therapist, or human-to-human replacement any more than the internet was. The Machine, like the leader of the free world, can be a snake charmer if you offshore your power, project your own fear, or buy into the last gasps of systemic fear regurgitation.

This future is where teams and communities are built around many individuals, each carrying 10,000+ hours of expertise, bringing dramatically dynamic thinking and inspired, heart-based action together into building new worlds.

The possibilities are as enormous as the places your imagination and 10,000+ hours can take you, and as fierce as your refusal of diminishment, whether it is your own self-talk or the systemic nonsense being peddled.

It does not announce certainty over complexity. It stays honest inside it.

It leads from earned mastery rather than borrowed authority. From worth rather than fear.

And this leadership is distributed among the many who have done the hours.

Not hoarded by the one at the podium, working to control the narrative, and you.