Standing Still Is Rolling Backwards

A simple rule I keep coming back to

Whenever we learn something new, keep up with our industry, or sharpen a skill, we are moving forward. When we stop, it feels like we are just standing still. I used to think standing still was a safe, neutral place to be. I no longer think that place exists.

The easiest way to explain why is with a car.

AI is a car

Imagine a town where everyone walks. Some people walk faster than others, but the gap between the fastest and the slowest is small. By the end of the day, nobody is very far ahead of anyone else.

Now give some of those people cars.

The walkers have not slowed down. They cover exactly the same distance they did yesterday. But by evening, the drivers are a hundred kilometres away, and the gap grows every hour. Measured against the people around them, the walkers are falling behind, even though they never took a single step backwards.

That is what AI is doing to knowledge work. It is a car. The people and companies who learn to drive it do in minutes what used to take hours: a first pass at a market scan, a cleaned dataset, a translated briefing. Countries are doing the same at a larger scale. When more and more of the people around you are driving, walking at your usual pace is no longer neutral. In relative terms, you are moving backwards.

There is no parking on a hill

The car is only half of the picture. The other half is the road, and it runs uphill. By now almost everyone has been handed the keys: the tools are cheap and within easy reach. What matters is whether you actually drive.

Every year, the baseline rises. What impressed a client three years ago, a well-formatted deck or a tidy summary of the market, is now something they expect by default, or can produce themselves with a few prompts. Leaving the car idle on that road is not parking. It is sitting in neutral on a slope. You do not stay where you are. You roll backwards, slowly at first, then faster.

This is the part that worries me most for people who have decided to wait and see. AI does not only speed up the people who are already moving. It also quietly pulls back the people who are not, because it keeps making the road steeper.

The same distance is worth less

Skills behave a lot like money. Inflation quietly eats into what they are worth.

When everyone walked, being able to reach the next town in a day was a valuable skill. Once cars arrived, it stopped being special. The skill did not disappear, but what people would pay for it fell. The same thing is happening to many of the skills that used to set a professional apart: summarising a long report, writing a clean first draft, building a basic model in a spreadsheet. They still matter. But the skill set you had five years ago is worth less today.

That means some skills need to be relearned, and some need to be unlearned. Unlearning is the harder part. It means letting go of habits that made sense for a walker, like doing every step by hand because that is how you were trained. Then it means planning your work around the speed a car makes possible.

Opportunities go to the people already moving

There is one more reason the gap widens instead of holding steady. Experience compounds, the same way an investment does.

People who drive more get better at driving. They get the projects that need a driver, which gives them more experience and more trust, which gets them the next project. If our skills fall behind, we do not only lose the work in front of us. We lose the chance to gain the experience that would have helped us shift up a gear and catch up. Falling behind is not a one-off loss. It compounds in the wrong direction.

A car still needs a driver

None of this means AI replaces people. Even a car that can steer itself does not choose where to go. Someone has to pick the destination, know the roads, and keep their hands on the wheel when conditions change. A fast car with no destination just burns fuel.

In practice, the people who get the most out of AI are not the ones who know the most tools. They are the ones who know their field well enough to point the car somewhere worth going, and who check where it has taken them before they trust it. The car multiplies your judgment. It does not supply it. I wrote about what that looks like in my own work in How I Actually Use AI in Consulting Work.

Forwards or backwards

So I have come to think there are only two directions. We are either moving forwards or rolling backwards. There is no parking space.

Getting moving does not need to be dramatic. Pick one task you do every week and learn to do it with AI. Keep going deep in your own field, because that is what tells you where to drive. And be willing to unlearn the habits that only made sense on foot.

Our value is not something we earn once and keep. It is something we have to prove again, a little further down the road each time.