Never have a take on a tool you haven’t touched

“You don’t need to know how it works. Just what it does.”

Someone gave me that advice early in my career. For a while I believed it.

It’s the fastest way to become useless in this field.

Here’s the trap. The higher you move up, the easier it is to have opinions about tools you haven’t touched in a year. You read the launch post. You nod in the meeting. You sound right, because nobody else in the room has touched it either.

Then the ground moves.

In the AI era it moves every few months. The tool you had a confident take on in the spring behaves nothing like it does now. Your judgment was real once. It went stale while you were busy sounding smart.

So I made myself a rule. I don’t get a take on anything I haven’t used with my own hands. Not a demo. Actually used it. Broken it. Found the wall where it stops working.

It costs time. It’s also the only thing that makes my opinion worth having.

The people who worry me most right now aren’t the ones who know less than me. They’re the ones who stopped checking.

Which one are you this quarter? Still getting your hands dirty, or running on a take you formed six months ago?

Originally posted on LinkedIn.