I have a theory that one of the most valuable things you can develop over the next decade is an opinion.
Not an audience. Not a personal brand. Not even expertise, necessarily.
An well-informed opinion.
I don’t mean becoming the person at dinner who has a hot take on absolutely everything. Nor do I mean forming strong views on things you know nothing about and broadcasting them with inexplicable confidence. I think we can all agree the internet has enough of that already.
I mean developing the ability to encounter something - a business, an idea, a piece of design, a cultural shift, a way of working - and decide what you think about it. Not what so-and-so told you they think about it. Or what your favourite podcaster thinks about it.
Increasingly, I think that’s a rarer skill than it sounds.
We have access to more information than any generation before us. We can Google the history of an idea, read seventeen expert perspectives on it, find a Reddit thread arguing both sides, listen to a three-hour podcast and now, of course, ask AI to synthesise the whole thing into a perfectly reasonable position before we’ve even had the chance to form one ourselves.
Information is abundant.
Analysis is becoming abundant.
Reasonable answers are becoming very, very abundant.
Which makes me wonder whether the valuable bit is moving somewhere else.
Perhaps the question is no longer simply What do you know?
It’s What do you make of it?
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I was paid to have opinions
I don’t think I fully appreciated this until I looked back at my career in branding.
On the surface, clients hired us to make things. Strategies, identities, websites, campaigns, packaging.
But the further I got into it, the more I realised that making the thing wasn’t always the most valuable part of the job.
Clients came to us because they needed someone to look at a sea of possibilities and say:
