The ability to recognize excellence in a field without firsthand experience is a superpower. If you have it, you skip the years of trial and error. You make better decisions. You move faster. You see things others don’t. Most people think you need experience to know what good looks like. They’re wrong. Excellence follows patterns. Once you learn how to spot those patterns, you can operate at a high level in any domain, even if you’ve never set foot in it. But most people never figure this out. They assume expertise is earned through time instead of insight. The best hiring managers don’t need to know how to code to recognize a world-class engineer. The best investors don’t need to be former founders to spot the next billion-dollar startup. The best taste-makers don’t need to be artists to know which designs will win. They all have something in common. They see what others miss. They break apart a field, find its hidden structure, and spot the signals that separate the best from the rest. Look at any field. The top 1% don’t just work harder. They think differently. They focus on things others ignore. They make decisions in ways that seem counterintuitive at first but are actually rooted in deep principles. This is where most people get it wrong. They assume greatness is about talent or luck. In reality, it comes down to a series of repeatable choices. If you want to recognize excellence without years of experience, your job is to find those choices. What do the best prioritize? What do they refuse to do? What do they see that everyone else is blind to? The first step is exposure. You can’t recognize world-class work if you’ve never seen it. Study the best. Not the most famous, but the people who consistently produce exceptional results. Compare good vs. great until the differences become obvious. The second step is asking the right people. Most people don’t know what makes them great. They just do it. But a few can break it down in ways that shift how you see the world. Find those people. The third step is using proxy indicators. If you don’t have firsthand experience, use external signals to guide you. Look at past performance. Pay attention to who top operators trust. Watch how the best in a field talk about their work. Patterns will emerge if you look in the right places. This isn’t about faking expertise. It’s about seeing reality more clearly than everyone else. People who can recognize excellence without direct experience move differently. They hire better. Invest better. Think better. They don’t get distracted by noise because they know what actually matters. They learn faster because they see the patterns others overlook. They make smarter decisions because they aren’t waiting for experience to show them the way. Most people go through life reacting to what’s in front of them. The ones who shape the future have a different skill. They know how to spot what’s great before anyone else does. Once you learn how to do that, everything changes.

One of the most interesting discussions I’ve had recently, with @Blake_Hall The first 30 min or so of his backstory in the military will wake you up His views on identity are fascinating Spending time with Blake will make you want to be uncompromising in what you do

Great news for creators: the @XMoney Account, enabled by @Visa, will debut later this year. Visa wants to be everywhere money moves. By powering X Money through Visa Direct, we’re building on our recent move to recognize digital creators as small businesses, because we know they make a big impact on the digital economy.