There is a quiet war happening in every industry right now, surprisingly the people losing it are not the incompetent ones. They are actually quite good. But being good is no longer enough to protect them.
I want to talk about why.
What does the Law of Averages say?
The law of averages comes from a real principle in statistics (at least I found something useful with the concepts I learnt in Computer Science😂). It says that over time, as more trials happen, results stop being extreme and start moving toward the middle. Outliers get absorbed. The average wins.
A simple example. If you flip a coin ten times and you might get seven heads. But flip it ten thousand times and you will land very close to five thousand heads and five thousand tails. The outlier does not disappear because something went wrong. It disappears because the numbers around it grew.
That is exactly what is happening in your career.
When any industry is young, results are all over the place. Some people are very skilled, most are not, and the gap between them is wide. But as the field grows and more people take the same courses, watch the same tutorials, and use the same tools, the gap closes. What used to be exceptional becomes expected. The field does not need you to fail. It just needs enough people to improve until your level is no longer rare.
Your competence stops being your advantage and starts being your entry ticket.
Let’s Talk About The Canva Effect
When Canva came along, it did not just make design easier. It moved the average. Suddenly small businesses had clean social media pages. Startups had decent pitch decks. The bar for what looked acceptable went up fast.
The designers who found themselves in trouble were the ones whose only value was making things look nice. Because now Canva could do that, or close enough.
The ones who stayed relevant had gone deeper. They understood brand strategy. They could look at a design and explain not just whether it looked good but whether it would work for a specific audience and why. They were solving business problems, not just making visuals. That kind of thinking cannot be automated or templated away.
Canva raised the floor. It did not touch the ceiling.
The same pattern plays out in tech, in finance, in content creation. Every time a tool lowers the barrier to entry, the average rises and the people competing only at the average level lose ground without doing anything wrong.
Take Apple; What Apple Understood
In the late 1990s, Apple was not the strongest tech company by any objective measure. IBM had more resources. Microsoft had more market share. On paper, Apple was not winning.
But people did not buy Apple products because of better specs. They bought them because of what owning one meant. Apple had built something around their work that could not be measured in a product comparison table. A story. A clear identity. A feeling.
Steve Jobs understood that in a world where technical competence was spreading, competence alone would stop being the differentiator. The meaning around the product would matter more than the product itself.
Your work is your product. What is the meaning around it? What do people feel when they think of you and what you do?
The AI Effect
Artificial intelligence is doing to every skilled profession what Canva did to design, but faster and at a much larger scale.
A developer who writes clean code is no longer rare. AI writes clean code. A copywriter who produces decent work quickly is no longer rare. AI does that too. A data analyst, a translator, a customer support specialist, the list keeps growing. The tools are not just lowering the barrier to entry. They are removing it entirely for a large portion of what used to require years of training.
And the uncomfortable reality is that most people are still competing at the level AI has already covered. They are optimizing for speed and output at exactly the moment when speed and output stopped being scarce.
What AI cannot do is think with your specific experience behind it. It cannot carry your perspective, your relationships, or your judgment built from real failures and experiences. It cannot replace the person who understands the human problem underneath the task. It generates answers. It does not ask better questions.
The people who will survive the AI shift are not the ones who fight the tools. They are the ones who use them to go deeper into the parts of their work that are irreducibly human.
Don’t Panic: What You Need to Do
Skill still matters. You cannot skip the work. But here is where your energy also needs to go.
Be visible.
Jesus says in John 12:32, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” The principle is straightforward. When people can see you, they are drawn to you. When they cannot, they move on to whoever they can find. You can be the most skilled person in your space and still lose work to someone less capable simply because they showed up and you did not. Write about what you do. Share how you think. Put your work where people can actually see it. Tell the world who you are and what you do. No one pays a silent and hidden expert.
Go deeper, not just better.
There is a difference between being good and being the person people think of for a specific thing. The more focused your niche, the harder you are to average out. Do not just be a designer or a developer. Be the one who solves a particular problem for a particular kind of client. That is where the crowd thins.
Build an identity, not just a portfolio.
A portfolio shows what you made. An identity tells people who you are. Your point of view, how you think, what you stand for, these things cannot be copied by the next person who learns your exact skill set. People hire people they feel they already know.
Own a position in someone’s mind.
When a specific problem comes up, does your name come to mind? That is the real question. Competence gets you considered. Being the obvious answer for something specific is what makes them call you first.
The Quiet Truth
The law of averages is patient. It does not compete with you or attack you. It just keeps filling the space around you with more people who can do what you do, until the thing that once made you stand out becomes the minimum people expect.
Your competence is not the problem. Thinking that competence alone is a strategy is the problem.
The people who stay ahead are not always the most skilled. They are the ones who understand that standing out is a decision you keep making.
The average will always rise to meet you. The question is what you are building that the average cannot touch?