AI Taking Your Skills? Packy McCormick’s Human Survival Strategy (Not Boring Memo)
Packy McCormick’s influential “Not Boring” memo, “Most Human Wins,” provides a crucial strategic framework for humans to not just survive, but thrive alongside increasingly capable AI.
The Commoditization Trap:
Competing directly with AI on skills it can easily replicate is a losing battle. As execution becomes cheaper, value shifts. Are you focusing on skills AI complements or skills it substitutes? Relying on interchangeable processes puts you directly in the path of automation.
McCormick’s Human Strategy:
Join Thinking On Paper hosts Mark and Jeremy as they dive deep into McCormick’s actionable blueprint for the AI age. This isn’t about technical specs; it’s about strategic positioning, human ingenuity, and leveraging AI as a powerful tool:
💡 Commoditization vs. Complements: Identify which tasks AI devalues and where uniquely human skills (creativity, taste, empathy, strategy) become more valuable.
🚀 Run Up The Stack: What McCormick means by using commoditized AI outputs as inputs to focus on higher-level abstraction, novel experiences, and strategic thinking.
✨ Differentiation is Survival: Why your unique perspective, taste, ability to connect disparate ideas, flexibility, and even humor become critical economic differentiators.
🧠 Ideas Over Execution?: How AI might be flipping the value equation, making strategic insight and novel idea generation more critical than ever.
🏆 Most Human Wins: Embracing imperfection, vulnerability, and connection – why the things AI can’t do become scarce and precious.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Disruptors And Curious Minds
0:43 Not Boring Newsletter
2:00 Is AI Really Taking Our Jobs?
3:07 Commoditization Of Human Skills
5:12 The Ingredients Of Outputs Are Changing
7:39 Abstraction: Aim Higher
9:29 Be A Business, Man
10:24 Advice For Parents
11:00 AI Collateral Damage
12:52 The Value Of Ideas
13:54 Know Yourself
14:38 Differentiation And Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy
17:00 Will We Be More Human?
18:10 Hot Buttons
20:13 When Resources Are Scarce: Move Up The Stack
21:22 Who Turned Off The Funny Button?
23:10 How Do You Find Scarce?
27:19 Creativity For Everyone
29:15 I Hate Perfect
32:55 The US V UK AI Comparison
35:24 The Energy Cost
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