The Hedge Changes
On unlearning skill-as-safety and learning people-as-leverage.
As children, we’re trained to hedge with skill.
School and college reward a very specific behaviour: say no to distractions, say no to people, sometimes even say no to family, and focus entirely on studying. The message is consistent and logical: your safety comes from competence. If you are good enough, things will work out.
And for that phase of life, this is mostly true.
The system is simple. Exams are deterministic. Effort maps cleanly to outcomes. You don’t need anyone’s approval to do well. Skill is the primary hedge.
The mistake many of us make is never updating this model.
We carry it unchanged into the workplace.
We carry the same rulebook into the workplace, where the system is no longer simple or fair or linear. We keep polishing skills in isolation and assume outcomes will follow. Sometimes they do. Often, they don’t.
You see this in moments that feel purely technical.
“Should I just build this the right way and ship it, or should I run it by a few people first?”
The student instinct says the work should speak for itself. If the solution is solid, alignment will follow. Asking around feels like delay.
But offices don’t run on skill alone.
They run on trust, visibility, sponsorship, timing, and human judgment. Your work matters, but so does who understands it, who believes in it, and who is willing to back it when decisions are ambiguous.
At work, people become the hedge.
Not in a transactional way. Not networking-as-a-game. But in a deeply human sense: relationships compound. Context travels through people. A short conversation can prevent weeks of rework. Shared understanding can turn a good solution into one that actually lands.
This requires unlearning.
- You have to unlearn the reflex to always say no.
- Unlearn the belief that focusing on people is “wasted time.”
- Unlearn the idea that merit automatically surfaces.
None of this means skill stops mattering. Skill is still the entry ticket. But after a point, skill stops being the differentiator.
As the equation changes, so must the strategy.
Childhood teaches us to protect ourselves with competence. Adulthood teaches us something harder to accept:
people, not skills, are the real hedge in life.