I've been trying to figure out what I'm actually good at. Not the CV version - not "strategic thinking" or "brand development" or whatever language you put on a LinkedIn profile to sound employable. The real thing. The skill underneath the job titles. And I think I've finally found it, and it's embarrassing how simple it sounds: I'm good at seeing what matters.
That is it. Give me a hundred things - articles, brands, products, trends, ideas, restaurants, albums, whatever - and I'll tell you which three matter. Not which three are popular. Not which three are trending. Which three matter. Which three will still be worth paying attention to in a year. Which three have substance underneath the surface. I don't always know why I know. I just know.
I realise this sounds like nothing. It sounds like something you would never put on a CV because no hiring manager would know what to do with it. "Skills: seeing what matters." There's no certification for this. There's no degree programme. You can't take a course on it. And yet I'm increasingly convinced it's the only skill that actually differentiates anything I do from what anyone else could do.
Where it comes from
I've been training this skill since I was a teenager and I didn't know I was doing it. Growing up in Nottingham, I would get my hands on whatever print magazines I could find. The Face: i-D. Dazed and Confused. These weren't magazines you read front to back - they were magazines you scanned. Hundreds of pages of fashion, music, design, culture, art, all competing for your attention simultaneously. You had to learn to filter. You had to develop an instinct for which pages to linger on and which to flip past. The magazines didn't tell you what mattered. You had to figure that out yourself.
That was the training. Not school. Not university - where I did a marketing and communications degree that taught me frameworks but not instincts. Not the career I fell into in advertising. The magazines. The constant practice of scanning and filtering and deciding, on some gut level, what deserved more attention. I didn't know I was building a skill. I thought I was just reading magazines.
And then the internet arrived and the scanning never stopped. Twitter in its peak era - 2010 to 2015, the golden years - was the ultimate scanning environment. Hundreds of voices. Thousands of links. The timeline moving faster than you could read it. And somehow, in that torrent, you had to find the signal. The tweet that was actually saying something. The link that was actually worth clicking. The conversation that was actually going somewhere. The people who could do this - who could drink from the firehose and pull out the three drops that mattered - those were the people who shaped culture on that platform. I was never one of the loud ones. But I was always one of the ones who saw it first.
The rapid-switch brain
My wife would describe it differently. She would say I always have five things open. Phone in hand, laptop on the table, something playing on the TV, a conversation happening, and my brain somewhere else entirely, making a connection between two of those five things that nobody asked me to make. I'm a rapid switcher. I move between inputs constantly - not because I can't focus, but because the connections happen in the switching. The interesting thing is never in one source. It's in the gap between two sources. It's in the pattern that emerges when you put the tech article next to the fashion trend next to the restaurant review next to the football tactic.
I know this looks like distraction. It looks like the opposite of the "deep work" that productivity culture fetishises. But I think there are two kinds of valuable thinking. There's the deep, focused, single-track kind - the kind that writes code and solves equations and builds engines. And there's the scanning, pattern-matching, connection-finding kind - the kind that sees the relationship between things that nobody else thought to put in the same room. Both are real. Both matter. But only one of them shows up on a CV.
CultureTerminal exists because of this skill. I built it because I was already doing the work - scanning dozens of sources every day, filtering for what mattered, mentally assembling a picture of what was happening in culture right now. The tool just automated what my brain was already doing. Curio does the same thing for social signals. Trove does it for personal taste patterns. Every project I've built is, at its core, an attempt to externalise the scanning and filtering that I do naturally, all day, every day, without thinking about it.
The CV problem
Here's what frustrates me. This skill - seeing what matters - is the most valuable thing I bring to any room I'm in. In advertising, it was the thing that made the strategy work. Not the frameworks. Not the research decks. The moment in the meeting where someone presents forty consumer insights and I say "it's number seventeen - that's the one" and the whole room knows I'm right but nobody can explain why. That moment. That instinct. It decided more campaigns than any amount of data analysis ever did.
But try putting that on a CV. Try explaining it in a job interview. "What's your greatest strength?" "I can scan a hundred things and know which three matter." It sounds either arrogant or vague. There's no metric for it. There's no case study that isolates it as a variable. You can't prove it with data because the whole point is that it operates before the data, ahead of the data, in the space where data hasn't arrived yet.
I think this is why the career has been harder to navigate than the building. Building is easy for someone with this skill because you can see what to build. You scan the landscape. You see the gap. You know what matters. And then you make it. But the career - the part where you convince other people that you have something valuable to offer - that requires translating the instinct into language, and the instinct resists translation. It is pre-verbal. It is pre-logical. It's the pattern recognition that happens before conscious thought catches up.
Proving it by building
This is why I build. Not to have a portfolio. Not to learn to code. Not even to make products that people use, though I want that too. I build to prove that the skill is real. Every project is evidence. Look - I saw that culture aggregation mattered before anyone was talking about it, and I built CultureTerminal. Look - I saw that personal taste patterns were underserved, and I built Trove. Look - I saw that nostalgic brand aesthetics had an audience, and I built Modern Retro. Each one is a case study in seeing what matters and then having the nerve to act on it.
The projects are the proof. Not the CV. Not the interview answers. Not the strategic frameworks or the research methodologies. The fact that I can look at the world, see something that needs to exist, and build it - that's the only way I know to demonstrate a skill that has no name, no certification, and no obvious place in a job description.
If I could redesign my career around one sentence, it would be this: I help you see what matters. That is the offer. Whether it's for a brand trying to understand culture, or a product trying to find its audience, or a team trying to decide where to focus. The value is the same. Cut the noise. Find the signal. Know which three things out of a hundred are the ones that'll still matter tomorrow.
Nobody teaches this. You can't learn it from a textbook. You learn it from decades of scanning - magazines, timelines, cities, conversations, menus, shelves, screens. You learn it by being the person who always has five things open, always noticing, always making connections that nobody asked for. You learn it by trusting the instinct even when you can't explain it, by saying "this one" before you can say why, and by being right often enough that you start to trust the pattern recognition that you can't see but can feel working.
It isn't strategy. It isn't advertising. It isn't curation, exactly, though curation is the closest word. It is seeing. And I wish there were a better way to say it than that, but there isn't. I see what matters. That's what I do. Everything else is just the format it comes out in.
