"I started a new role at AWS six months ago.

20 years in tech.
7 years teaching at Stanford.

Day one, I felt like a complete beginner."

More access to knowledge than ever.
More overwhelmed than ever.

The bottleneck has shifted.

The amateur rushes to find answers.

The navigator pauses to ask better questions.

• Software Engineer → Solutions Architect
• 1 product → Hundreds of SKUs
• Cubicle → Customer sites up and down the West Coast

Facts are cheap. Patterns are valuable.

You can't memorize everything.
You CAN learn to pattern-match.

You don't understand something
until you've made something with it.

Reading = Surface
Explaining = Better
Building = Real Understanding

• Technical Role → Sales Management
• Indirect contribution → Direct quota responsibility
• Business school helped. But not enough.

Perfectionism kills learning velocity.

What's the 20% I need to know
to be 80% effective?

February 2020

Sales & BD Director at Slalom Consulting.
Selling teams of consultants.
Building relationships in person.

And then...

Relationships built before the crisis
sustain you during the crisis.

But sometimes, navigation means knowing
when to exit — not just adapt.

• Chairing the AI Task Force
• Too few people. Too many things to do.
• The nonprofit sector's universal constraint.

"Non-technical people vibe coding
their way into product-building confidence."

From "I can't do that"
to "Let's try it."

• ChatGPT voice: "Give me a 4th grade spelling bee."
• Replit: "Tell me what you want in the game world."
• Me building their ideas in real-time.

"If you can think it, you can express it.

If you can express it, you can manifest it."

That's the shift.

"Palo Alto kids are a big part
of my monthly burn right now."

Getting them off my payroll
won't happen for a while.

But if they learn this mindset...
I'm not worried.

So here I am.

• New product portfolio.
• Customers who don't know what to build yet.
• Market changing week by week.

My job: Helping them navigate ambiguity.

Try This Week

1. Pick something you've been avoiding because you're "not an expert." Give yourself 2 hours to get dangerous.
2. Document your own learning process. What's your first move? Where do you get stuck?
3. Teach something you just learned. You don't need to master it to share it.