I've come to learn that "do only what only you can do" is not great advice at all. It's leagues better to be the 10,000th-best SWE at Meta than the world's best basketweaver. Often doing something super unique is an excuse for shying away from mainstream competition.

For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".

I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.

Nothing useful.

So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.

While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.

But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.