Welcome to Issue 75 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about storytelling, brand building, and how to navigate our modern need to be online. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) (Miss past issues? Read those here.)
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Hello Reader,

I was sitting across from my 11-year-old at a restaurant for one of our first mother-daughter dates in ages when she burst into tears.

“Oh, babe! What’s wrong?”

I had just asked her how the first few weeks of school were going.

“It’s fine,” she said, wiping her eyes in embarrassment. “It’s just that all of my friends are in the advanced math class and I’m not. Turns out I’m the dumb one.”

I closed my eyes, instantly transported back to middle school, high school, college, when I felt the exact same way.

Like her, I’ve always hung out with the smart kids. In school, I felt most comfortable with all the nerds in AP. And I kept finding myself surrounded by those same bright, ambitious people as I transitioned from the classroom to the office.

But in school, it wasn’t because I was particularly precocious or naturally gifted. It was because I felt like I fit in most with the kids in those rooms.

Having moved from Mexico to a small town in Alabama when I was 8, I was not your typical Southerner. And the smart kids in all those advanced classes weren’t either. They mostly came from immigrant families.

What we had in common, at least according to me, was a cultural conditioning that made us weird in the same way. Compared to many of our more all-American classmates, our worlds felt much bigger than God and football.

So, I worked hard to muscle my way into the classes where I could be with the kids who shared more of my worldview. By some miracle, I even got into advanced math in 10th grade.

But because I just barely made it in, I always felt like I had to work harder and study longer than everyone else in there, which made me feel like I was behind. Or, as my daughter put it, like I was the dumb one.

It wasn’t until I made a name for myself as a reporter, that I realized the ways in which I’m actually a smart one. And it’s the same type of smarts my daughter has.

For instance, she picks up on social cues and can read people better than most adults. She asks questions that draw the most intimate things out of her friends, and has that quality about her that makes people feel instantly comfortable. She has a curiosity that leads her to ask big, important questions about how we live and think. She’s always the mediator in arguments between her friends. And she engages with grown-ups in conversation with a level of emotional maturity that often makes us forget she’s only 11.

In other words, she has deep human intelligence.

So I reminded her of all of this. And shared that I, too, felt like the dumb one amongst my friends in school because school—and society more broadly—doesn’t (yet) have a good way to measure that type of intelligence, much less test for it. You get grades that calculate your ability in math, science and reading. But you only get a participation mark for social-emotional learning.

Though things are shifting, I reassured her.

Social-emotional learning (or SEL), for one, wasn’t even a class that existed when I was in school. And while we still don’t have a way to grade it, studies show that having high human intelligence—like empathy, emotional capacity, judgment, taste, humor and the ability to cooperate, read social cues and understand context—is the stuff that helps you be successful in all areas of life.

While she started feeling a little better, she still wasn’t convinced. So I tried something else.

“Listen,” I said. “You know who’s going to have the hardest times finding a job by the time you enter the workforce?”

“Who?”

“The kids who are only smart in math. Because if that’s the only way they’re smart, the machines have already caught up.”

A Good Reframe

When I’m feeling bleak or uncertain about the future and the options that will be available for all of us, I come back to this quote by Minouche Shafik, the former president of Columbia University and the London School of Economics who’s now an economic advisor to world leaders, during an interview about the changing landscape of global education, politics and the future of work:

"In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they're about brains, but in the future they'll be about the heart.”

She said this back in 2018—a couple of years before most of us had any idea that an AI threatening to take all the jobs (or off us entirely) would be the thing keeping us up at night.

But what she said then rings even more true now. You can see it in the recent shift around the skills our economy values most and the way we’re judging expertise.

The last time we saw a shift this massive in all those areas was during the industrial revolution, when jobs that required physical strength and manual labor to build things and farm were replaced by machines. So work—and the skills we valued—moved to what we could do with our minds instead.

Since then, most of modern work has relied on our cognitive skills and using our brains to build things. And we’ve built an entire system to measure that value—from tests, grades and degrees in schools to résumés stacked with credentials at work.

But what happens when the brainy things that we can measure with a test can be done by a super-intelligent-in-the-ways-of-math machines?

Skills, expertise, status and what we value most move from the head to the heart. And, just as Shafik predicted, that’s the shift we’re in now.

If you need proof, there’s plenty of it.

For instance, LinkedIn's 2026 "Skills on the Rise" report, which pulled from one billion member profiles, found that human capabilities and expertise in things like conflict mitigation and public speaking sit alongside AI literacy among this year's fastest-growing in-demand skills. And “soft skills” as a whole made up seven of the ten fastest-growing skills worldwide.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report named “adaptability” as the single most critical skill for 2026, ahead of technical expertise or certifications, according to 85% of organizations surveyed. And it predicted that analytical thinking and creative problem solving—both currently considered “soft skills”—will be the most in-demand skills by 2030.

What’s even more interesting is how we’re actively working to reshape the language around these skills.

Instead of soft skills, HR and L&D leaders are calling them "power skills," "human skills," and "durable skills," since using the word soft implies they're less important in the workplace.

As for which jobs will see the most growth by sheer volume in just the next five years, economists are predicting that we’ll need more nurses, social workers, counselors, personal care aides and teachers. In other words, all people who know how to work with people.

But even the non-people people are having to adapt. Already we’re seeing that engineers, who held some of the most sought-after and highly paid jobs (secured, I’m sure, by kids who graduated from the advanced math class), are now spending far less time on coding and more time on tasks like collaboration and communication.

Remember hearing this? “The problem is not that bots are becoming more human-like. It’s that humans are becoming more bot-like.”

Yeah, it’s the opposite of that. We’re being forced to identify what makes us a uniquely intelligent species and value those things.

What gives me some (perhaps blindly optimistic) hope in the whole conversation around AI taking all the jobs and ending humanity is that this narrative hinges on the belief that the type of intelligence we’ve evolved to value most in the past century—the type that can be measured, calculated and replicated by an algorithm—is superior and will ultimately surpass the human intelligence we’ve put less of a premium on.

Ultimately, as individuals and a society, we can choose not to buy into that narrative. And, while the sorting system still needs to catch up, we can start leaning into our uniquely human intelligence to both connect with the people we’re trying to reach while also demonstrating our value, proving our worth, gaining status and being chosen for our expertise.

A Good Practice

If you’ve been paying attention, it’s evident that these “soft skills” aren’t just what employers are hiring for, it’s what we’re all looking for when figuring out who to listen to or buy from—especially from people selling services.

So you can put that you went to Harvard or worked for Google in your bio, but you can’t prove that you’re empathetic, adaptable, creative, cooperative or that have excellent taste or judgement just by putting those words on your LinkedIn headline. You have to demonstrate those things.

You have to tell a story that helps us understand the way you think. You have to prove you have judgement and taste by sharing your perspective and opinions on your industry or space.

And sharing what your breakfast taught you about B2B sales won’t cut it. But what your 10 years in B2B sales helped you understand what buyers actually want and how’re you’re noticing a shift in how things are done helps me understand how I should be thinking about the industry, too.

Not only does that story help me do my job better, it helps secure you as a real expert in B2B sales in my mind.

If critical thinking is what’s going to get your hired, then you need to give us your take on all the research and data you spent so much time sorting through—not just tell us you’re a “research-backed” messaging strategist. Those words, without context that connects with something your audience cares about or needs to know, are meaningless on their own.

And, most importantly for those of us trying to win clients, customers or a build an audience around our expertise, you have to help us understand that you understand us.

Again, you can't just tell me you’re empathetic. But you can show me by convincing me that you get what I’m struggling with, as well as what I’m hoping for or want, by telling me about your experience with the same thing or your experience with someone you helped.

If you can articulate the thing that’s keeping me up at night that I don’t have the words for, you’ve won me over. At that point, the fact that you went to Harvard or worked at Google or have a masters in data analytics is entirely irrelevant because you get it—you get me and you've helped me understand the problem more intimately.

And now, I feel like the smart one.

A Good Takeaway

The credentials we've earned are important and have their place. But they’re increasingly meaningless without also helping us understand who you are and how you can help—especially if it’s helping us sort through how to think or feel about a problem.

We have so much intimate knowledge about our industries, the problems we help solve and the people we serve. But we have to see the value in leading with it, instead of hiding behind the credentials we were taught to trust in a dying system that only values things of the head.

The things my daughter is best at, getting people to tell her what's really going on and making them feel understood when they do, is a deeply human skill that we all have access to.

And while it’s not something we can measure or test, it is the thing that will help us get chosen.

But beyond that, it’s the thing that’ll help us get back to a more human way of doing business. It’s a way that’s leading with the heart and supported by the head.

A Few Good Resources

1. If I can't convince you, maybe Jasmin Bina can. Here's how she's encouraging us to rethink our personal brands.
2. Eddie Shlyener on how to use your uniquely human intelligence to find out what your customer really wants.
3. If you're in the Bay Area and free next Tuesday, I'd love to meet you at this event.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee