Morning, CEO!
What if I told you the smartest person alive spends 70% of his time doing glorified janitorial work?
I recently watched an interview of Terence Tao.
If you don’t know him, he’s basically the Beyoncé of mathematics. The Mozart of numbers. The guy who makes other geniuses feel like they are eating crayons.
He’s transforming a 2,000-year-old “handcraft” industry into a high-speed, automated factory of truth.
And in the process, he’s rewriting the job description for every knowledge worker on the planet.
Including you.
1. The Audit: Identifying the “70% Tax”
We have this romantic idea of “The Expert.”
I picture Terry Tao staring out a rainy window, listening to Bach, waiting for a lightning bolt of inspiration that unlocks the secrets of the universe.
The reality?
Terry admits he spends 70% of his time on “drudgery.”
Formatting papers. Checking citations. Debugging typos. Translating variables.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of scrubbing the toilets so you can host a dinner party.
In your “Agency of One,” you are likely hoarding the drudgery. You think checking the details is “the work.” You think grinding is where the value is.
But Terry realized that manual perfectionism was costing him volume.
He could either be:
A) A perfectionist craftsman who produces one perfect vase every 10 years.
B) An architect of a factory that produces perfect vases daily.
He chose option B. He is aggressively adopting Lean (a coding language for math) and AI to handle the grunge work.
If the Mozart of Math is okay with outsourcing the “hard part” (the rigorous checking) to a machine, why are you still manually formatting your own spreadsheets?
You aren’t protecting your quality. You’re just paying a 70% tax on your own potential.
2. The Scale Problem: Breaking the “Star Graph”
Before AI, collaboration in math was a nightmare.
It looked like a “Star Graph.” One genius in the middle (usually exhausted) and a bunch of helpers reporting back to the genius.
Why?
Because of the Trust Gap.
If Helper A writes a proof, the Genius has to check it manually. Because if Helper A had a bad day, or a hangover, or just sucks at math, the whole project explodes.
Verification was manual. Trust was personal. And that is a massive bottleneck.
Tao is moving to a model of “Trust the Code, Not the Person.”
By using formal verification software (and AI to write it), he doesn’t need to know you. He doesn’t need to trust you.
If your code compiles, your logic is true.
This turns math into LEGOs. I can build a brick. You can snap it onto your spaceship. We never have to speak.
We usually think business relationships must be built on “trust.”
But actually, trust is friction.
Trust requires coffee chats, vetting, and reputation management. Scalable systems rely on verification.
As you build your operation, stop trying to hire people you “trust.” Build systems that verify the output so you can work with anyone.
3. The Pivot: From “Rigorous” to “Post-Rigorous”
This is my favorite part because it makes me feel better about being a chaotic thinker.
Terry has a framework for the three stages of learning:
Stage 1: Pre-Rigorous (The Drunk Toddler). You have intuition, but you’re wrong half the time. You think you can fly. You cannot.
Stage 2: Rigorous (The Nervous Lawyer). You learn the rules. You follow them perfectly. You lose your creativity because you are so terrified of making a mistake.
Stage 3: Post-Rigorous (The Jedi). You know the rules so well you can ignore them. You return to intuition, but now it’s accurate.
Most mid-career pros get stuck in Stage 2.
We are obsessed with being “Rigorous.” We want to be right. We obsess over the details because that’s how we got promoted.
Terry sees AI as the ultimate Stage 2 Employee.
AI loves rules. It loves syntax. It loves checking for errors. It is the ultimate Nervous Lawyer.
By letting the AI handle the Rigor, you might feel lazy. You aren’t doing the heavy lifting anymore.
But the upside? You get to skip straight to Stage 3.
You get to be the Jedi.
Don’t compete with AI on “correctness.” You will lose.
Compete on “vision.”
The goal of your Agency isn’t to be the best rule-follower. It’s to be the one deciding which game we’re playing.
The Bottom Line
We are witnessing the Industrial Revolution of Logic.
Terry Tao isn’t trying to be the smartest worker on the factory floor anymore. He’s designing the assembly line.
Your job this week?
Find your “70%.” Find the rigorous, boring, necessary tasks that make you feel productive but are actually just keeping you busy.
Fire yourself from those tasks. Hire the robot.
And go be the Architect.
Links:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com
https://github.com/teorth
Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder
Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI
