It's never been so profitable to give up on yourself.
Wait, that sounds wrong. Let me explain.
I mean giving up on what you think you know. Throwing away the things you learned through years of hard practice - the skills, the frameworks, the reflexes you built over a decade.
We hold on tight because this knowledge is who we are. It's connected to our identity, our self-image.
Watch the newcomers
When you look at new people entering the market - the ones building AI-first products, the fanatics starting from zero - there's a lightness and flexibility to how they move.
They don't carry the baggage of "this is how it's always been done."
They don't have ten years of best practices whispering in their ear that this new approach can't possibly work.
Meanwhile, the experienced ones among us? We're optimizing the old playbook while the game has changed entirely.
The hardest skill in a rapidly changing world isn't learning something new. It's unlearning something old.
What to keep, what to throw away
This isn't about burning everything down. That would be reckless.
The real skill is knowing what to keep and what to release.
Some things you've learned are timeless - how to communicate clearly, how to build trust, how to make decisions under uncertainty. Those stay.
But the specific tools? The frameworks that worked in 2019? The management techniques designed for a pre-AI world? Those need a hard look.
Here's a useful exercise: take everything you "know" about your field. Now ask yourself - if I were starting today, with no history, would I learn this? Or would I learn something else entirely?
The gap between those two answers is your unlearning opportunity.
Why this matters for managers
Managers are particularly vulnerable to this trap. Because management, more than most fields, is built on accumulated experience. "I've been managing teams for 12 years" is supposed to be a credential.
But 12 years of managing in one paradigm doesn't prepare you for a new one. It sometimes actively holds you back.
The manager who learned to measure productivity by hours in the office? They need to unlearn that.
The manager who built their reputation on having all the answers? They need to unlearn that too.
The new paradigm rewards curiosity over certainty. Questions over answers. Adaptation over expertise.
Start tomorrow morning. Look at one thing you're doing because you've always done it that way. And ask: is this still the best way? Or is it just the familiar way?