IQ Gets You Hired. EQ Gets You Promoted. AQ Determines If You Survive.
Your expertise is depreciating faster than you think. And the only thing that matters is how fast you notice.
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Imagine spending twenty years becoming the best in the world at something.
Master craftsman. Decades of training. Generations of family tradition. Entire towns organized around your expertise.
Then one day, someone presents a technology that makes everything you know worth less than it was yesterday.
And you look at it and say: “That’s not real work. That’s just a novelty.”
Ten years later, you’re unemployed. Along with fifty thousand others who made the same mistake.
That’s what happened to Swiss watchmakers between 1967 and 1980.
In 1967, a Swiss research lab invented quartz technology. Electronic timekeeping. More accurate than any mechanical watch. Cheaper to produce. Revolutionary.
They presented it at the annual Swiss watchmaking conference. Demonstrated the prototype. Showed what it could do.
The Swiss watchmakers dismissed it. Not real watchmaking. Just electronics.
Seiko and Citizen attended that same conference. Both Japanese companies saw the quartz demonstration the Swiss walked away from.
Ten years later, quartz dominated the global market. Swiss watch exports collapsed. Fifty thousand master watchmakers lost their jobs.
They didn’t lack intelligence. They were brilliant engineers. They didn’t lack emotional intelligence—they’d built collaborative systems that lasted centuries.
What they lacked was the ability to see that their expertise was about to become worth less than they’d spent building it.
And that’s the brutal truth about expertise now: it has a half-life.
What you mastered five years ago isn’t just less valuable today. It’s actively holding you back. Because every hour you spend perfecting the old thing is an hour you’re not spending learning the new thing.
And everyone else is learning the new thing.
The Swiss watchmakers spent the 1970s perfecting mechanical movements while Seiko perfected quartz. Every improvement they made to their craft, every refinement to their technique, every hour spent becoming better watchmakers—all of it made them worse at what was coming next.
That’s the hidden cost of low adaptability. Your expertise doesn’t just depreciate. It prevents you from building new expertise. Because you’re too busy defending what you already know to learn what you need to know.
There’s a term for this. Something that matters more than intelligence or emotional awareness.
I call it AQ. Adaptability Quotient.
It’s not how smart you are. Not how well you work with people. It’s how fast you can see your expertise losing value and rebuild before it’s too late.
And here’s where it gets painful: you’re not just defending a skill. You’re defending who you are.
The Swiss watchmakers weren’t just mechanical engineers. They were craftsmen. Artists. Their identity was built on intricate movements and precision mechanics. Generations of family tradition. Entire communities centered around this one craft.
Quartz didn’t just threaten their jobs. It threatened their sense of self.
That’s why adaptability isn’t really about learning speed. It’s about ego. About your willingness to let go of who you’ve been to become who you need to be.
High AQ people see their expertise fading and they feel it. The loss. The grief. The fear that everything they worked for might not matter as much as they thought.
Then they move anyway.
They don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. They just know that clinging to the old identity while the world moves to something new is worse than the pain of letting go.
Low AQ people can’t do this. They see the same shift happening. They feel the same fear. But instead of moving, they optimize.
They double down on what they know. Get even better at it. Perfect it. Become world-class at the thing that’s disappearing.
Because admitting your expertise is becoming obsolete feels like admitting you wasted years of your life. And that’s unbearable.
So they tell themselves a different story. That quality still matters. That craftsmanship still matters. That the old way was better and everyone else is just chasing trends.
And they’re not entirely wrong. Quality does matter. Craftsmanship does matter.
It just matters less than it used to. And no amount of perfecting it will change that.
The Swiss watchmakers saw quartz technology. They understood it was better in measurable ways—more accurate, more affordable, more reliable.
But they couldn’t let go of being craftsmen. Couldn’t rebuild their identity around electronics instead of mechanics. Couldn’t become beginners again after spending decades as masters.
So they kept perfecting mechanical movements. Kept getting better at something the market was moving away from. Kept telling themselves that true watchmaking required gears and springs and human touch.
And the better they got, the more convinced they became that they were right and the market was wrong.
That’s the final trap of low AQ: your expertise becomes your blindness. You get so good at something that you can’t see past it. Can’t imagine that anything else could be better. Can’t accept that the thing you mastered might not be the thing that matters anymore.
The people who survive don’t avoid this trap by being smarter or more emotionally aware. They avoid it by being willing to feel stupid again.
By being willing to be a beginner at something new when they were just a master at something old.
That’s AQ. And it’s the hardest thing to develop because it requires killing a part of yourself.
Not the skill. The identity built around the skill.
Intelligence gets you hired. Emotional intelligence gets you promoted. But adaptability determines if you’re still here in five years. Still relevant. Still building something instead of defending something that used to matter.
Because expertise doesn’t compound anymore. It depreciates. And the rate of depreciation is accelerating.
The only question is: can you see it happening and let go before it’s too late?
Or will you be a Swiss watchmaker, perfecting something beautiful that the world has already moved past?
Thank you for reading.
– Scott
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