Charles Hudson questions the effects of automating or skipping basic repetitive work on professional development. Using analogies to sushi rice making and professional-services tasks (e.g., drafting safes, convertible notes, redlines), he wonders whether repetitive early-career work builds attention-to-detail and foundational skills (e.g., typo-free consulting decks) or whether those repetitions were unnecessary and can be skipped in modern workflows.
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Historically, in professional services, the way you got better and learned was you started with very mundane tasks and you repeated those, kind of like making rice at a sushi restaurant. And so you got really good at, hey, this person can do safes and convertible notes, red lines and everything. No errors. Now let's move them on to long form financing docs. And you went up this ladder of complexity by repeatedly doing basic things. What happens when you skip the basic repetition? Sushi, rice making, part of the journey. I'm just very curious what that means for people's professional development in these fields. And maybe we'll learn that those reps were empty calories and they were really useless and you didn't need them. Or maybe we'll learn that the attention to detail and a lot of the skills that you learn from doing those things over and over are a good reinforcement mechanism for what it means to be successful. Like, my friends who worked at consulting would never have a typo on a deck. Like I've. It's never like. It's literally like never happened. And I think it's because of the repetition and you know how it is having that beaten into you over and over. I don't know what happens for people who skip that step in their professional journey, but I'm quite confident we're going to find out.