My mother asked me a good question at dinner one Sunday. Why was I studying for a wine exam, and did I not have better things to do?
It was a fair question, and she meant it kindly. I had been drinking and learning about wine seriously for about thirty years. By then, I was running the North American division of a global luxury agency specializing in wine and spirits. And there I was sitting the WSET Level 1, the beginner qualification, the one they hand people on their first day. A few weeks later I learned I had passed, with 91 percent.
My friends find this funny. They also find it funny that I listen to the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis. Peter and his colleagues, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail, Emad Mostaque, and Alex Wissner-Gross, talk about AI, robotics, space, and living longer, and what all of it does to the abundance economy. I listen when I get ready in the mornings, in the car, on the way to meetings, while normal people listen to music. Then I go home and read their books. There is a running joke about the hours I spend learning things nobody has asked me to learn.
The hours are real. What they are for is the whole of this letter.
That is the fourth move of the Reinvention Operating System. Sense the shift. Shed the container. Choose to create. Then compound the human.
When I first wrote this down, I said that the things worth having are the ones a machine cannot fake. Your taste. Your judgment. The friends you have had for twenty years. The way you tell a story. Knowing, three seconds into a meeting, that something is wrong with a plan everyone else likes. I said those things grow quietly more valuable while the rest of the work gets handed over to software, and that hardly anyone tends them on purpose. I believe all of it still.
What I left out is what it costs, and what it looks like from the outside while you are paying.
It looks like a detour. It sounds like your mother, at Sunday dinner, asking whether you have better things to do.
Here's how it actually went.
None of it began as a business plan. In the fall of 2018, I started going up to Napa because I wanted to, on my own time, while I was still running my own agency and looking after clients who had nothing to do with wine. By 2019, I was up there a week out of every month.
In January 2020, I was offered a job in wine, in marketing, and I took it. The work mattered less to me than what it made possible, which was an address. I was going to move to Napa and live inside the thing I loved. In March, days before I was due to start, it was gone. COVID took it, along with a great many other people's plans.
That September I met the man who would become my business partner. The following April I opened the North American office for a global luxury creative agency that specializes in wine and spirits, with offices in Portugal, Bordeaux, and California. I spent the next three and a half years there, until November of 2024: branding, packaging design, naming. I tasted with clients and with people I hoped would become clients. I sat that beginner exam somewhere in the middle of it, which tells you how far in I was.
I have thought about that March more than once. I had chosen a door, and it shut in my face. Six months later, a different one opened, and it led further into the world I wanted than the first one ever would have. I am not usually a woman who says fate. What I will say is that I had spent two years making myself useful in that world for no reason at all, and when the moment came, I was the obvious person to build it with.
Six years, if you count from the first drive up.
What I lost while I was gone came back quickly. Not painlessly, but quickly. The industry had changed, and there was new lingo to pick up, which sounds like a small thing and is not, because the words are how you prove you still belong in the room. My peers had moved: new shops, new titles, new companies. My old clients had moved too, some of them twice over. And the pitch itself, the thing I had done hundreds of times, had to be rebuilt from the floor up for a world with AI in it.
What I gained was something no one could have handed me. Years of tasting seriously beside people whose families had been at it for generations. A palate I had been building for most of my adult life and finally got to use at work. A firsthand understanding of how a business built on scarcity and story really works. Winemakers I now count as friends. Long evenings in rooms where the wine costs more than the campaign and nobody cares what your title is.
I want to be careful here, because the tidy version of this story has me making a sacrifice and being rewarded for it later, and that is not what happened. I was not being strategic. I went where I was curious, into a world I have loved for most of my adult life, and I came back knowing far more about it than when I left. I also came back knowing more about how people choose beautiful things, which turns out to be my actual job.
Which is why this is not simply a nice story about wine.
Half of what you carry can be replaced fast now, faster than at any point in my working life. The vocabulary, the tools, the current best practice, whatever everyone in your category has suddenly started saying in meetings: AI has made catching up on all of it quick. What used to take a year takes a season, and the season keeps getting shorter.
The other half has not moved an inch. You still cannot hurry a palate. You still learn taste and judgment by being wrong out loud, in front of people who remember it. And a friendship twenty years old took twenty years.
So, the math on going away has changed, and I do not think many people have noticed. The thing that always made it feel risky, the fear of coming back to an industry that had moved on without you, is now the smallest part of the bill.
There is a line from Jiro Ono, the sushi master, in the film they made about him in 2011. "Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work." He goes on to say you must never complain and must give your life to mastering your skill.
I love the line, and I do not entirely accept it. Jiro immersed himself in one thing, in one place, behind the same counter for most of a century, and his son waited fifty years for that counter. That is craft. Craft is beautiful, and it is also a bet that the counter will still be standing.
Mine was a different bet. I have been an interior designer, a restaurant owner, a media buyer, a director at a global agency, a brand builder at a wine and spirits agency I co-founded, and now I run my own shop. The rooms kept changing. What I was immersing myself in was never the job. It was the thing I carried into the job and carried back out.
Here is how you do it, and the first step is the one everybody gets wrong by doing only half of it.
One. Name your one, then name what it costs you.
Everybody can name their edge. Ask a room of senior people what makes them different, and you will get taste, judgment, relationships, instinct, all of it delivered with real conviction. Ask the same room what they have agreed to be ordinary at to have it, and the conviction goes quiet. The second half is the test, because going deep on one thing is a decision to leave other things alone, and that has a bill attached. Mine arrived in 2024, and I paid it in new vocabulary and a lot of phone calls. This week, write one sentence: I am building this, and the price is that I am ordinary at that. If the second half comes up empty, you are collecting compliments, not building anything.
Two. Sort what you know by how long it takes to get back.
Two columns. On the left, everything you could pick up again in a season if you lost it tomorrow: the tools, the platform certifications, the current language, the names of this year's players. On the right, everything that took you years and would take years again: the palate, the read, the people who pick up when you call. Most people spend the whole week defending the left column, because the left column is what gets noticed when it slips. The right column is where the good stuff quietly accumulates, and nobody sends you a reminder about it. This week, make both lists honestly, then look at where last week's hours actually went.
Three. Get graded.
Ninety-one percent is a humbling and extremely useful number. It told me something thirty years of enjoying myself never had: exactly where the holes were. Seniority is comfortable partly because it takes you out of any system that scores you, and a skill nobody measures will quietly stop improving while you go on believing it is your edge. Find something that grades you in your own subject. An exam, a certification, a peer with no reason to be gentle, a client who will tell you the truth if you ask properly. This week, pick one and put it on the calendar before you talk yourself out of it.
Four. Go where you are curious, while it is still easy to come home.
There is a world you have been circling for years. Another category, another craft, another country, the thing you read about on vacation and then close the tab on. You have kept it at arm's length because leaving your lane felt like a risk. It is much less of one now, and the machine is the reason. Go and be a beginner somewhere serious, for long enough that it changes what you notice, and then bring that back with you. Nobody in your industry will understand the trip until about two years after you return. This week, name the world and book one real thing. Not a webinar. A room, with people in it who are better than you.
Before you close this, sit with three questions. Answer them the way you would answer someone who can tell when you are performing.
· If I named the one thing I am building in myself, what have I quietly agreed to be ordinary at, and can I live with that?
· Of the things I am afraid of losing, which could I pick up again in a season, and which would take me a decade?
· When was I last graded, in my own subject, by someone with no reason to be kind about it?
Keep the answers. Run them again in six months. The right-hand column is the one to watch.
My mother's question deserves an answer, so here is mine.
I am learning AI the same way I learned about wine. Badly at first, out loud, and with nobody asking me to. Podcasts on the way to meetings. Long evenings that could have been spent more sociably. And then, eventually, something real: I now build and train AI agents that run outreach campaigns for clients of mine. No course, no certificate at the end, no employer who required it. I did what I did in Napa, which was to stand next to the thing until it stopped being foreign.
People ask why I write about AI as often as I do, and the answer is the same one. I am pulled toward the big ideas, the ones that change the shape of a life: AI, space, robotics, how long we get to live. What holds me is the twenty-year question: what all of this does to people over time, and writing is how I work out what I think about it.
There is a phrase I use often, High Tech, High Human, and it is not mine. It belongs to my friend James Parham, known to everyone as Buff, who said it to me in a conversation about what I was building and told me to go ahead and use it. He is right, and this move is what his four words look like on a Tuesday. The more the machine can do, the more everything comes down to what only a person brings into the room.
The hours my friends laugh about are the only part of my career I have never had to rebuild.
Next time we run the fifth move and close the system.
Until then, one question to hold. If you spent the next three years somewhere else entirely, what would you come back carrying that nobody could have handed you while you were gone?
Ingrid Reyes
Founder, The Reinvention Project. A publication by Optima IQ™.