I’ve been thinking about intelligence lately. Not the kind you measure with degrees or titles, but the kind that actually matters when you’re trying to build something, make a decision, or just exist without losing your mind.
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I spent eight years in food tech. Revenue strategy, pricing, commercial growth across markets. I worked with people who had the pedigrees. Ex-consultants, Ivy League degrees, the kind of credentials that look impressive in a boardroom. And they were good. Really good.
They could walk into a pricing discussion and casually reference a framework I’d never heard of. They’d make complex market entry decisions look easy, speaking in a language that felt like a secret code I hadn’t been taught. When they said “let’s think about this through a Porter’s Five Forces lens” or “this feels like a classic prisoner’s dilemma,” everyone nodded. I nodded too, then Googled it later.
I was in awe of them. I wanted to be them.
So I bought books. Stacks of them. Strategy, pricing theory, behavioural economics. I spent hours on research, trying to close the gap between what I knew and what they seemed to know instinctively.
It took months to finish them. Some were boring as hell. And even when I understood the frameworks, I didn’t know when to use them. I’d read about game theory and network effects, but in a real meeting, faced with an actual decision, I’d freeze. Which framework applied here? Was I supposed to use this one, or was I forcing a fit where it didn’t belong?
Sometimes I’d think: this is the kind of knowledge you only get from their circles. Consulting. Ivy League. The rooms I hadn’t been in.
But no matter how much I read, the gap never fully closed. Because it wasn’t about the frameworks. It was about pattern recognition from reps, confidence from pedigree, the intangible things you get from being in certain rooms.
Here’s what’s changed: that knowledge isn’t locked anymore. You can ask AI the right questions and get frameworks synthesised in minutes. Frameworks I didn’t even know existed. The access barrier has collapsed entirely.
When I started building GUTSY, I needed to research ingredients. Gut health compounds, bioavailability, sourcing standards, regulatory requirements across markets. Two years ago, that would have meant weeks of digging through research papers, calling suppliers, piecing together information from ten different sources. I probably wouldn’t have started. The research burden alone would have felt insurmountable.
Now? I can get a synthesised overview in minutes. I can ask follow-up questions. I can compare compounds, understand trade-offs, get pointed to the right sources to verify. The research that would have been a barrier to entry is now just a Tuesday morning task.
Which means the real differentiator was never the information anyway. It’s knowing what to do with it.
The Old Contract Is Broken
We were raised on a specific promise: go to university, specialise, become an expert in something valuable, and that expertise would protect you. It would earn you respect, income, security.
That contract assumed scarcity. Scarce knowledge. Scarce access. Scarce ways to learn.
Now a 22-year-old with WiFi can teach themselves data science in six months. They can learn brand strategy from YouTube, financial modelling from free courses, copywriting from newsletters. They can ask AI to break down complex pricing models or synthesise research that would have taken weeks to gather. They don’t need the institution. They need the discipline to sit down and do it.
This terrifies some people. It should excite more of us.
What Intelligence Looks Like Now
I’m not talking about AI replacing jobs or ChatGPT writing essays. I’m talking about what it means to be genuinely smart in a world where everyone has the same tools.
Smart used to mean knowing more than others. Now it means:
Knowing what questions to ask. Not just any questions. The ones that cut through noise and get to the real problem. You can have access to every framework ever written, but if you don’t know what you’re actually trying to solve, you’ll drown in information that doesn’t help.
Synthesising faster than others. AI can give you the building blocks. But connecting ideas from different domains in ways that feel obvious only after someone else has done it first? That’s still human. That’s still rare.
Moving before you feel ready. Intelligence without action is just expensive overthinking. You’ll never have all the information. The discomfort of acting on incomplete certainty is where most people stall. The ones who move anyway are the ones who build things.
Admitting what you don’t know without apologising for it. This one’s harder than it sounds. We’re conditioned to perform expertise. But the smartest people I know say “I don’t know, let me find out” more than they say “here’s what I think.”
The Discomfort of Abundance
When I left corporate, part of what scared me wasn’t the lack of structure. It was the abundance of possibility.
I could learn anything. Build anything. Position myself as an expert in almost any space if I put in the hours. Or minutes, if I asked the right questions. That’s exhilarating and paralysing in equal measure.
Because if everyone can access the same knowledge, what makes you different?
Your taste. Your judgement. Your ability to act on incomplete information. The specific way you put ideas together that no one else would think to combine.
I spent eight years learning food tech, marketplaces, pricing strategy. I’ve built my own breadth, patterns those ex-consultants never developed. The books helped, but knowing the framework isn’t the same as knowing when to use it, when to ignore it, or how to adapt it to a problem it wasn’t designed for.
That’s where intelligence lives now.
What Keeps Me Up
I don’t want to romanticise this shift. We’re losing things that mattered.
Deep expertise still exists, but it’s harder to build when everyone’s optimising for breadth. The surgeon who’s done 10,000 procedures. The craftsperson who’s spent twenty years perfecting a technique. That kind of mastery requires focus we’re not rewarding anymore.
What worries me: speed is replacing depth. Everyone can access frameworks, but no one’s building the instinct that comes from years of actually doing the work. Someone could replicate GUTSY with better prompts and less scar tissue. The advantage I spent eight years building in food tech might not matter as much as I thought it would.
I spent eight years learning food tech, marketplaces, pricing strategy. I’ve built my own breadth, patterns those ex-consultants never developed. The books helped, but knowing the framework isn’t the same as knowing when to use it, when to ignore it, or how to adapt it to a problem it wasn’t designed for.
That instinct, that judgement, still takes time to build. The question is whether the market will care, or whether someone with the right queries and enough confidence will move faster and win anyway.
What I’m Still Working Out
Those ex-consultants I worked with? They were genuinely impressive. But what I mistook for exclusive knowledge was often just pattern recognition built through reps. They’d seen more deals, more markets, more pricing models. That breadth gave them confidence I didn’t have yet.
Now anyone can build that breadth faster. The question is whether they’ll do anything with it.
If I could go back to that boardroom now, I wouldn’t try to match their vocabulary. I wouldn’t wait to understand every framework before I spoke. I’d trust that eight years of seeing pricing patterns across food tech markets gave me something they couldn’t access with a degree or a query. I’d speak plainly about what I’d seen work and what I’d seen fail. I’d move on decisions faster because I’d know my gut was built on real data, not just confidence from a pedigree.
That’s the only intelligence that can’t be automated. The messy, instinctual pattern recognition you build from years in the field. The judgement that comes from making calls, watching them play out, and learning what your gut actually knows.
What does intelligence look like to you these days?