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My first job at the Motley Fool was analyst and writer, covering media and entertainment stocks. Oldies like Comcast, AMC, Warner Music, and Disney. Newer ones like Activision Blizzard, Take-Two, and Netflix.

I built the DCF models, did the research, and pretty quickly, I learned my first real lesson of being a "content creator": I could write the best, most in-depth article on the internet, and it didn't matter if nobody was around to actually read it.

So I got obsessed with the small stuff first: headlines, thumbnails, metadata.

Then the bigger stuff, which was distribution: eyeballs before everything.

Then I got asked to move seats.

I went to audience and lead gen, where every piece we published needed a distribution plan behind it: SEO, syndication, partnerships, or paid. I built a simple plan to customize our lead gen tactics based on the content types, and it worked. Nothing fancy. Just increased our monthly lead number.

Then I got asked to move again, this time to product and retention, where a 1% bump in retention was worth a few million dollars in revenue.

A year or two later, marketing; finally, head of growth. Fast-forward my career and you get The Hustle, HubSpot, and eventually Hampton, where the cofounders asked me to build the thing from near-zero (we got it to $10M in 2 years).

The story of my 'career' was never the function itself — the marketing, the data, the product — it was the ability to hit a number.

The method changed at every stop along the way and the number or metric changed, too, but the job was see a number, hit a number, move on to the next number.

I'm obviously over-simplifying, but I do think if you run a company, this matters in two ways. First, your own job will keep changing. Second, you need a team whose jobs can keep changing, too.

I was reminded of all this reading a recent First Round piece on Mckenzie Lock, a pretty gangster executive who spent seven years running product and ops at Netflix.

One small task of her team's many responsibilities was to automate how Netflix tags its titles. There were, specifically, analysts who used to watch every title, start to finish, and tag it by hand (!), which almost took double the duration of the film.

Today, it takes minutes.

Some of the work they cut was work the analysts genuinely loved: watching something closely and writing about it (how amazing of a job was that?).

Lock told them, though, that two things can be true at once: a task can be enjoyable and add value and still not be necessary anymore. Her line, which I will steal here:

Molly Graham (who spent five years at Facebook leading mobile strategy, then was COO of Quip, which Salesforce bought for $750 million) calls it giving away your Legos.

Her rule is that if you want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple of months. At Quip, her title stayed the same while the actual work changed every three months.

The Legos you built were fun; after all, you built them from scratch. They're your Legos!

But you still have to hand them off.

AI is going to change most of our jobs in the next five years, and probably sooner.

Lock said this: the tools you learn today may be obsolete in two years, but your instinct for them and your ability to adapt won't be.

Which means the people who'll thrive (on your team, and you yourself) are the ones attached to the outcome, not the method.

If someone's identity is "I'm the person who builds the spreadsheet," then you better believe AI is a threat. But if someone just thinks, "I'm the person who figures out what's broken," the AI is a big-time asset for them.

If you're hiring right now, here are five questions I'd ask to find out whether someone's attached to the outcome or the method:

Jason Cohen has three tips worth stealing: write down a specific hypothesis before you talk to anyone, ask about current behavior ("How do you decide whether an idea will work?"), never "Wouldn't this help you?", which only earns a polite, useless yes. Then find out how the buyer gets judged at work, because that decides what your product is actually worth to them.

On Shane Parrish's pod, Bill Ackman walks through his daughter Lucy's sudden brain hemorrhage, the hours before surgery, and running Pershing Square from her hospital room. It's a wild story, and it made me think about how much money and access shape who actually gets to recover, and who does not. He and his wife are now building an institute to help other families going through the same thing, and as a bonus, he explains why he sold Netflix and then bought it back.

If you loved Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe's book on Northern Ireland, his new one is almost as gripping, and still an absolutely great read. London Falling opens with a 19-year-old's death in London that looks open-and-shut, and parents who refuse to believe it. What they dig up pulls them into a side of the city most people never see. Dark, but it flies.

One question for you this week: what's something you were genuinely great at, and loved doing, that you've had to let go of?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan