The only thing AI can’t shortcut

The Solopreneur Copilot

P.S. read an web version of this email here: barrontech.kit.com/posts/

I was walking the neighborhood yesterday at noon. Empty street. One mom with a dog. That was it.

Where is everybody? Sitting in offices with people who don’t really care about them, then driving home to the same house they could’ve been working from the whole time. The whole arrangement is one of the great unforced errors of modern work, and most people are still doing it because nobody told them they could stop.

That’s not the point of this email though. The point is what I noticed walking back home, thinking about the people I’ve talked to this week. A couple of them are young – mid 20s, talented, not really sure what they should be doing with themselves. Asking the same question I asked when I was that age:

The honest answer is you don’t. And it doesn’t matter.

The myth

The myth most young people are sold is that you need a few years of “real experience” before you can start anything serious. Get the credentials. Pay your dues. Earn the right.

It made some sense 20 years ago when knowledge took years to acquire and tools took capital to access. You actually did need a few years inside an organization to learn how things worked, because there was no other place to learn.

The reality

That world is gone.

I can sit down with Claude or ChatGPT and learn the basics of an entire discipline in a weekend that used to take a year of being someone’s junior/associate etc. Not master it. But get to the point where I can have an intelligent conversation with someone who does it for a living and actually solve a real problem with what I learned.

The barrier between you and a working skill used to be access. Now the only thing standing between you and being useful is whether you’ll actually open the laptop and try.

What that means for a 25-year-old: most of the adults around you are not as far ahead as their LinkedIn profiles suggest. They got older. They didn’t necessarily get better. A lot of them stopped trying things ten years ago and have been coasting on a title since.

You can close that gap a lot faster than you think. Not in everything. But in something specific, that you care about, that solves a real problem – yes. Months, not years.

The breakdown

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Reps are the moat now.

Real conversations with real prospects. Real clients you’ve delivered for. Real swings you’ve taken and recovered from. The people who actually win in the next ten years are not the people who watch the most YouTube videos about AI. They’re the ones who put themselves in front of other humans, said something specific, got rejected, adjusted, and did it again.

I sent a few video DMs over the past two days. Got one back. That one reply turned into a meeting next week with a consulting firm I’d actually want to work with. One reply. One meeting. That’s the real economy underneath all the AI noise – and it’s the same economy it’s always been. AI just means you can compete in it sooner than anyone before you could.

So if you’re 22, 25, 28 and waiting for someone to tell you that you’re ready – nobody is going to. The people you’re waiting on permission from don’t have it to give you. They’re guessing too. They just got older.

Bet on yourself. Pick a problem. Talk to people who have it. Use AI to compress the learning. Take the swing.

The worst thing that happens is you learn faster than the people who didn’t.

– Matt

P.S. – if you’re sitting on the fence about starting something and want a second pair of eyes on it, hit reply. I remember being on the other side of it.

P.S. All previous emails can be read here: barrontech.kit.com​

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