🧠 Curiosity Corner

I need your help designing the cover of The Invisible Advantage (coming out in April!) It should take 1-2 minutes at most.

My publisher sent across 4 preliminary options, just to choose a design direction to go in. They’ll use your feedback to keep working on new designs.

Just click below to vote! Thanks in advance 😄

🛠️ Career Strategy

This is a repost from Oct 2025, but the audience has grown a lot, so I figured I’d share again.

Job descriptions are mostly full of bullshit. Consider, for example, these quotes from today’s job round-up (which are otherwise amazing roles):

When you tell your spouse what you did today, I suspect it’s not any of those. These are corporate gobbledygook that tell you nothing. They fail to explain the specific behaviors or tasks you will do daily on the job.

But it’s no surprise JDs look like this. They are neutered by countless rounds of review from Legal, HR, and any other “risk-mitigating” department that wants to weigh in, until there is no signal in the noise. The actual problems the hiring manager wants to solve have disappeared from the page.

In fact, most of the signal gets hidden behind this phrase: other duties as assigned.

It crops up in many, if not most, job descriptions and offer letters, where it does an enormous amount of heavy lifting. In simple terms, it gives employers the ability to assign you tasks and responsibilities they hadn’t explicitly written out at your time of hire.

Seems innocent enough, right? Wrong.

At least, that’s what a cursory Google search will reveal – here are a few of the headlines I found:

The author of that last article, lawyer and corporate executive Dean Frieders, asserts that “using ODAA [Other Duties As Assigned] … makes it hard for the employee to know what their primary focus is and should be. It makes it hard for the employer to track employee productivity and justify head count.”

Dean is right that ODAA is messy. But that mess is where the real money is made. If projects are the key to accelerating your career, as I previously asserted, it would seem that the best strategy for advancement is to take on extra responsibilities. Software engineer Simon Sarris puts it clearly, “At work you should almost never only do the tasks assigned to you. There is always more you could be doing that will be more interesting, more profitable, more ’impactful’. Speculative stuff way outside your job description.”

It turns out, as you get more and more senior, the JD is superfluous; it might as well not exist.

The secret, never written down, never printed on company letterhead, is this: the higher you rise, the less the script matters. There is only one job duty that matters at all: handling that dreaded “other duties” slop bucket. Why?

Past a certain altitude, your only job is value creation.

This is the essence of commercial rigor, which is being able to tie your daily activities to business outcomes (i.e. profitability). If you are commercially rigorous, you recognize that your one and only job is to increase the profitability (and therefore the terminal valuation) of the business. You should be doing whatever duties enable you to do that, whether assigned or not; if you can do it, you’ll rapidly make more money and be more valued. The job description has nothing to do with it.

🤖 AI Tactic

Recently, I’ve been teaching myself how to use Claude Code. My coding knowledge is rusty at best and I’ve never professionally used my programming skills. I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag.

So I wondered if Claude Code could help me move beyond the small vibe coded projects I’d been doing for spreadsheet analysis or manipulating Google Docs.

It turns out that industrious Claude Code users have created agents and skill templates for everything you can imagine.

💼 Job Board

Here are the 3 most interesting remote job openings I’ve seen this week:

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

P.P.S. if you liked this, forward it to a friend. And if you hated it, forward it to an enemy.