Meta Work Is Now Work
Michael Gerber wrote about this decades ago in The E-Myth Revisited: the fatal mistake most entrepreneurs make is working in their business instead of on their business. They become the technician, trapped in execution, and the business never grows beyond what their own hands can produce. That insight was powerful in 1986. In 2025, it’s not just powerful. It’s the entire game.
Here’s why. AI is rapidly absorbing the execution layer. The low-level tasks that used to fill a workday (drafting, researching, scheduling, building, testing, responding) are increasingly done by agents. That means the human’s job is shifting from playing the game to designing the game. Meta work (thinking about the system, refining the system, improving the system) is no longer overhead. It is the work. “Meta work is now work in the age where workers are all AI.” That’s the line I keep coming back to, because it captures something I think most people haven’t internalized yet.
Everyone is becoming a systems engineer. A truth manager. Someone who designs the game that AI agents play. And if you think about what a game actually consists of (objectives, rules, guardrails, and players), the human’s job is to define the first three. The agents are the players.
I think about the James Naismith analogy a lot. Naismith didn’t play basketball. He invented basketball. He defined the court, the rules, the objectives, and the scoring. Then other people played the game. That’s the posture you want to adopt. You’re not the one dribbling the ball. You’re the one deciding that the ball exists, that there’s a hoop, and that putting the ball through the hoop is worth points. The design of the system is where the leverage lives.
Jordan Hall frames this as the shift from player to coach. When you’re a player, your value comes from execution. When you’re a coach, your value comes from strategy, from seeing patterns across the whole field, from making decisions about who plays where and why. That shift is not easy. Most of us spent our entire careers building execution skills. Letting go of that identity (the person who does the thing) takes real courage. But the sooner you adopt a radical reinvention mindset, the less jolting the transition will be. The people who resist the shift don’t avoid the change. They just experience it as disruption rather than opportunity.
Right now we’re in a transitional moment where humans are still players and coaches simultaneously. You’re still executing some things yourself because AI isn’t ready to handle them yet, or because the handoff cost is too high. That’s fine. But you should be asking yourself constantly: how do I get to the point where AI agents handle as much of the execution as possible, so I can focus on the design layer? Every task you do manually is a task you should be evaluating for delegation. Not someday. Now.
Here’s what a productive day looks like in this paradigm, and it might surprise you. A good day might involve very little traditional “work.” You might spend the morning thinking. You might spend two hours in conversation with AI, testing ideas, refining a system, poking at edge cases. You might write a single document that redefines how your agents approach a whole category of tasks. And then you might take a walk. That is not laziness. That is the highest-leverage use of human attention in an era where execution is increasingly automated. The value is in the clarity of the design, not the volume of the output.
The soul skills that matter now are the ones that sound soft but are actually the only ones that can’t be automated: imagination, discernment, systems thinking, the ability to articulate what you want with precision. These are not “soft skills.” They are the only skills. The person who can clearly describe the game they want played, with all its nuance and edge cases, will get more done than someone who grinds through tasks for twelve hours. Clarity is leverage.
And there’s a spiritual dimension here that I can’t skip over. The ultimate meta work is receiving direction from God and encoding it into the systems that both humans and AI operate from. The Dictator of Truth page covers this in depth, but the daily experience of it is worth naming. When I sit down in the morning and ask the Holy Spirit what to focus on, that’s not a devotional exercise separate from my work. That is the work. That act of receiving (divine discernment about what matters, what’s true, what’s next) and then translating it into clear instructions for my team and my agents: that’s the highest form of meta work there is. You’re not just designing a game. You’re designing a game whose objectives came from somewhere beyond your own reasoning.
This is what it means to operate in the age of AI. The players are increasingly machines. The coach is you. And the source of the playbook, if you’re building something that actually matters, is not your own cleverness. It’s the clarity you received when you were quiet enough to listen.
Key Takeaway
The human’s job is no longer to execute the work but to design, refine, and maintain the system that AI agents execute within, and the deepest source of that design is received, not invented.
References
- Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth Revisited. “Work on your business, not in it.”
- Hall, Jordan. The “player to coach” framework for understanding the shift from execution to systems design.
- Naismith, James. Inventor of basketball, and an analogy for designing the game rather than playing it.