Why do you believe business skills are greater than technical skills, and where can I learn business skills?
I believe business skills outweigh technical skills because creating something functional is now easy with no‑code tools, but knowing whether it solves a real problem and delivers value is what truly matters— that’s a business skill. Focus on learning business skills: identify problems, apply yourself to points of highest leverage, and treat effectiveness as the core. These skills are also valuable life skills.
He says identifying problems is key; business skills are essentially effectiveness skills—being good at business means you're effective at applying yourself to points of highest leverage. He recommends the book *The Goal* by Eli Goldratt and the Farnam Street website for effective thinking, first‑principles reasoning, and understanding leverage intuitively.
Focus on soft skills—especially sales—because the technical side of building products or services has become trivial with drag‑and‑drop tools and AI. The real leverage comes from being able to sell and communicate value; once you can sell, you can learn the needed technical details on the fly. The barrier to entry for technical work has shrunk to about 1% of what it was a few years ago, so sales skills remain the highest‑impact, high‑income competency.
It's easy to get started with AI communication because the companies building these models intentionally make them accessible so anyone can get decent results without being a prompt engineering expert. However, the real advantage comes from skill: due to a power‑law relationship, improving your prompting ability from the 90th to the 99th percentile can roughly double the quality of the AI’s output. In other words, small gains in skill produce large gains in results. While the basics are simple, mastering AI prompting is hard, and because AI is a meta‑tool that enhances all other tools, becoming proficient at it makes you effective across many domains.
Never say never. I've been in agencies for about 10 years — I got out of school and started a marketing agency, sent hundreds of proposals, talked to thousands of people, and basically seen the same business model pitched a thousand different ways. When you see something that many times, you start picking up on the trends. My recommendation: don't try to think like an automation developer, think like a business person in general. Every business is basically a pipeline: there's a customer, you pay some money to get that customer, your business adds value to what the customer wants (a project, knowledge, a product, whatever), and at the end you get a higher-quality thing you can charge more for. So there's a multiple on the value of the raw good versus the finished thing. That gives you three or four places to optimize right off the bat: lead gen and sales, fulfillment, and retention. Think of every business through that lens and the automation opportunities become obvious.