There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Written nearly four hundred years ago, and true every single year since: the sophistication needed just to hold your ground keeps rising. The skills that earned your last two promotions are now the job description of someone ten years younger and considerably cheaper. That is not injustice. That is the bar moving, which it has always done. The professional who stops upgrading is not standing still; he is walking down an escalator that only goes up. Past forty, the upgrade is rarely technical. It is judgment, negotiation, reading rooms, growing people: the layer above the work that juniors and machines keep absorbing from below.
Practice
- Once a year, write down what got you your current role. Then ask: who is doing that for less today?
- Move your learning budget up the stack: from tools to judgment, from skills to people-reading.
- Stop calling experience an asset by itself. Experience compounds only when reviewed; otherwise it is just time passed.
Use this when
- Use this when work feels harder than it "should": the feeling is accurate, the expectation is outdated.
- Use it when mentoring someone who thinks success should arrive on schedule.
Ignore this when
- Don't use it as a licence for despair; a harder game is also a game with fewer serious players.
- Don't let it turn into nostalgia. The simpler past also paid simpler salaries.
A picture of it
A branch manager of the 1990s ran his world with a ledger, a landline, and a firm handshake. His successor today juggles core banking, three apps, compliance training, social media complaints, and a WhatsApp group where customers escalate at midnight. Same designation, triple the game. The ones who thrive treat the new layers as the job. The ones who suffer keep waiting for the old job to come back.
Complexity is the subscription fee of the modern career. It auto-renews whether you pay attention or not.