When I read through my feed, I hear a lot of fear sprinkled by a little bit of excitement. And the easiest way to get engagement right now is to make a declarative statement that some career is dead: Software Engineering is dead, Data Analysis is dead. And while I will admit and accept that most of my professional worlds will never be the same, I am not afraid. I am excited.

Excitement right now is coming from the ones who see the potential, and I don’t necessarily mean the potential of just doing more work. That to me is a momentary excitement, but ultimately a race to the bottom. If all you do is use AI to do more of what you’re currently doing, you are likely to drive your own value down by increasing the supply of your outputs.

I’m most excited by the enablement AI offers. Allowing those with deep passions and knowledge to program, write, build what they previously didn’t have the skills for.

I’m calling this The Passion Stack.

The Passion Stack

There’s been a trend towards smaller, lifestyle based businesses. And lots of buzz around building a personal brand, joining the creator economy, and becoming a solopreneur. I see this trend continuing, but where once the individuals were limited largely to written content and video content, I see them now be enabled to do so much more.

The Passion Stack to me is a combination of:

  • Passion - something you love to do
  • Knowledge - something you understand more than most
  • Community - a group of people who share your passion
  • AI - the tool that lets you transform your knowledge into something your community needs.

Where once you were limited to writing about your passion and sharing your knowledge, now you can turn it directly into a product. A beekeeper can move beyond writing about keeping bees to developing software for tracking hive health. A horseman can move beyond recording videos about training horses to creating an app embedded with all of his knowledge.

But it can move even farther into hardware. That same beekeeper could release an open source device for counting bees or monitoring movement. That same horseman could create hardware for tracking and quantifying the athleticism of a horse, that’s quickly becoming my story:

Passion

About 6 years ago I discovered that I love horses. To this day the place I find the most peace is in nature on the back of a horse. Horses are one of my passions. I have others, many in fact, but it only takes one to form the basis of your passion stack.

Passion is a wonderful thing because you don’t have to fight for motivation when working within your passion. For me, this is a huge benefit. But working at the intersection of data and horses, two of my passions, is almost effortless.

Inside the passion stack, passion is obviously important. It’s in the name! Starting from a place where you love to be offers a wonderful foundation for growth and building.

Knowledge

I spent a good portion of my career in Data and Analytics. I’ve built dashboards on Tableau, complex analysis in Jupyter, and data pipelines with Apache Airflow. I would say the data world is my area of deepest knowledge. If I were to claim a “T” shaped career, the bottom of the T would certainly be data.

Knowledge is the basis of many careers, but the problem with careers is that you’re not building for yourself and you’re often not building something you’re truly interested in. I love data, you could certainly say it is also one of my passions. But after I had built my 1000th dashboard that I knew wasn’t going to get used, I didn’t have a lot of motivation to build another.

But knowledge is important in the stack. Not knowledge of how to build or what to build necessarily. I’m talking about knowledge that can be applied to your passion. Technical knowledge can be handed off, but your domain knowledge cannot.

Community

I can pick any of my passions and name 10 people who have a similar passion. And the best part about it is that of those 10 people none have the same knowledge as me. If I stick to the horses example, there are probably 100 people I could name in my local area that share a passion for horses. To my knowledge not one of them has a deep data background. And where I might turn to that community to find a farrier, a vet, a trainer, etc. Maybe I could offer my data skills to that community?

My community is rooting for me and I’m rooting for them. I do frequently pay them for services, maybe I have a service to offer them? That’s the way to think about community inside the passion stack.

AI

The final component of the Passion Stack is AI. The great enabler. With AI you can easily take Passion + Knowledge and build something that will benefit your community.

For me this looks like Lame Data, my equine gait and lameness analysis platform. It has hardware, software, and hopefully soon a community.

With AI as a partner you can build things outside of your knowledge wheelhouse. There’s no reason you can’t build hardware that involves 3D printing, microcontrollers, websites, apps, and more.

Builder Economy

What was once the creator economy has now become the builder economy. We are witnessing the end of software as we know it. AI can help turn your passion and knowledge into a lot more than a blog post or YouTube video. It can help you ideate, build, and even sell to your community.

The creator economy made knowledge on marketing, writing, building business, etc very accessible. And I cannot wait to see what the builder economy produces. I’m not talking about the ClawdBot/OpenClaws. I’m talking about the domain specific tools built with a lifetime of domain knowledge and targeted to specific communities.

It’s time to start thinking through what your passion is, what knowledge you have that can be applied to your passion, and how your community might benefit from it.

What’s your Passion Stack?