I Am The Asset

I moved to Canada from China when I was 18 to study at the University of Waterloo. I didn't have a plan beyond: get the degree, figure it out from there.

I figured it out. Graduated. Built a career. Started a business. Made good money. Had clients across multiple countries. By most measures, things were working.

And then I realized that the thing I'd built my entire professional life around — my expertise, my knowledge of how specific systems worked — was becoming worthless. Not slowly. Fast.

The systems were changing. The information was being commoditized. AI could do most of what I was charging for. And the part it couldn't do — the human part, the judgment, the hard conversations — was the part I'd been undervaluing the whole time.

So I shut it down. Walked away from the revenue.

Not because I'm a visionary. Because I was honest with myself. And the honest answer was: this is over.

The Stages

I didn't arrive at this overnight. It happened in stages. And I think the stages are important because I think a lot of people are somewhere in them right now and don't realize it.

Stage one was denial.

Business was good. Clients were paying. Sure, things were shifting — but that was background noise. I was busy. Revenue has a way of making you feel like everything's fine.

Stage two was discomfort.

I started noticing that the questions people paid me to answer were questions they could increasingly answer themselves.

A consultation that used to take an hour of my specialized knowledge — an AI could do it in thirty seconds.

I was still useful, but I could feel the floor rising. The gap between "what I know" and "what's freely available" was shrinking every month.

And I was pretending not to see it.

Stage three was the gut check.

I had people depending on me. Real people.

I remember sitting with a client who'd just paid for a full strategy engagement — and halfway through the conversation, I realized that everything I was telling him, he could have gotten from a well-prompted AI session.

Not the nuance. Not the read on his specific situation. But 80% of the deliverable. The part he was paying for.

I had a choice: keep collecting fees and hope I was wrong, or tell people the truth and lose the income.

I chose the truth. Not because I'm noble. Because I couldn't sleep otherwise.

Stage four is now.

Rebuilding around the only things I have that can't be automated, cancelled, or commoditized. My judgment. My relationships.

My willingness to say what I actually think with my name attached to it.

That's it. That's all I've got.

I Was an Input

Here's the thing I keep coming back to.

I was an input and I didn't know it.

For years, I thought I was building a business. I was actually building a dependency. My entire value was knowing how systems worked.

I didn't own the systems. I didn't control them. I didn't even influence them. I just understood them — and I charged people for that understanding.

When the systems changed, my understanding became worthless. Not gradually. Overnight.

And I looked around and realized: this isn't just me. This is everyone.

The lawyer whose value is knowing how contracts work. The accountant whose value is knowing tax code. The consultant whose value is expertise that used to be scarce. The middle manager whose job is moving information between people who make things and people who decide things.

All of us built careers on knowing things.

And knowing things is becoming the cheapest commodity on earth.

What Survived

But not everything I did was worthless. And figuring out which part had real value changed everything.

The conversations where I had to sit across from someone and help them make a hard decision — that wasn't information processing. That was judgment.

Reading a person. Understanding what they actually needed versus what they said they needed. Having the guts to say something they didn't want to hear.

The relationships I built over years — the people who trust me enough to call at midnight, who take my word on things because I've been right enough times and honest about when I've been wrong.

AI didn't build those. I built those. By showing up, being straight with people, doing what I said I'd do, year after year.

The moments where I took a position — publicly, with my name on it, with real consequences if I was wrong. Not because I was always right. Because I was willing to be wrong in public, and almost nobody does that anymore.

The decisions about what to work on, who to work with, what to say no to. AI can generate a hundred options in a second. It can't tell you which one to pick. That requires living. That requires scars.

And the willingness to be accountable. To say "this was my call, and if it doesn't work, that's on me." In a world full of people hedging and disclaiming and hiding behind algorithms, accountability is becoming the rarest thing there is.

That's what survived.

Not my knowledge. Not my expertise. Not my understanding of systems.

Me.

The Kid at Waterloo

I think about who I was at 18, showing up at Waterloo with a suitcase.

That kid was the asset and he didn't know it. Not because he was special. Because he was the thing that couldn't be cancelled.

He didn't have a system to depend on. He didn't have expertise in anything. He didn't have connections. He just had himself — his willingness to show up, figure it out, be honest about what he didn't know, and build trust with people one at a time.

Somewhere between 18 and now, I forgot that. I got comfortable. I started thinking the business was the asset, the credentials were the asset, the knowledge was the asset. I started hiding behind systems instead of standing in front of people.

And then life reminded me — in the most expensive way possible — that none of those things were ever mine.

The Confession

I'm not writing this as advice. I'm writing it as a confession.

I almost got owned. I almost became so dependent on systems I didn't control that when they collapsed, I would have collapsed with them.

The only reason I didn't is that I was honest with myself just barely in time. And I had privileges that made rebuilding possible — savings, citizenship, time. Not everyone gets those.

I think about people who are in stage one and two right now. Business is good. Revenue is flowing. The discomfort is there but it's manageable. And they're telling themselves the same story I told myself: it's fine, I'm different, my expertise is safe, the disruption is happening to other people.

It's not. It's happening to you.

The timeline between "I'm fine" and "I'm obsolete" used to be decades. AI compressed it to months. The systems that felt stable enough to build a career on are not stable anymore. They're not even pretending to be.

Becoming the Asset

So what do you do?

You build in the layers that can't be taken from you.

Your identity — who you are, what you stand for, what you've actually lived.

Your relationships — not followers, relationships. People who take your call. People who trust your judgment in the dark.

Your willingness to take real positions, with your real name, and stand behind them when it's uncomfortable.

Your ability to select — to look at a hundred options and pick the right one, which requires judgment, which requires experience, which requires being wrong enough times to recognize right.

And your accountability — the willingness to own outcomes, good and bad, in a world where everyone is hiding behind disclaimers and committees and algorithms.

That's what can't be automated. That's what can't be commoditized. That's what can't be cancelled by a policy change or a platform update or an AI model that just got 10x better.

I am the asset.

Not in an arrogant way. In a terrified way. In the way you hold on tight to the only thing you've got when everything else is shifting underneath you.

I can't be automated. I can't be deplatformed. I can't be made redundant by a better model. Because the thing that makes me valuable isn't what I know — it's who I am, who trusts me, what I'm willing to say, and whether I stand behind it.

That's all I've got. It's all any of us have got.

The question is whether you figure that out before or after the system you're depending on decides it doesn't need you anymore.

Own or be owned.