I Am Not a Chess Coach

There is a book on my shelf about how expertise actually gets built. It has principles, chapters, a workbook at the back, and it takes its structure from László Polgár — the Hungarian who set out to prove that grandmasters are made rather than born, then raised three daughters who became world-class players, two of them grandmasters.

I wrote it. I am not a chess coach. I am not an education researcher. I hold no credential in pedagogy at all, and nobody asked me for one, because there was nobody to ask.

That last part is the whole of this note. There was nobody to ask.

For most of history, the barrier to owning something that pays you had very little to do with whether you were capable of building it. It was a toll, collected at the entrance, in one of two currencies.

The first toll is capital. Property is the cleanest example: you buy it once and the rent arrives every month afterwards, whether you get out of bed or not. That is a beautiful arrangement, and it sits behind a deposit most people will never assemble. Shares are the same: a portfolio large enough to pay anything meaningful in dividends starts from a sum most people are still trying to accumulate, not deploy. The asset is not hard to understand. It is hard to afford.

The second toll is skill, and it is paid in years. You can build software with no capital at all — a laptop and time is the entire input. But you cannot build it until you have become the kind of person who can, and that conversion is measured in years of unpaid practice. You are not buying your way in. You are working your way in, and the price is the same currency you were trying to buy back.

Put those two tolls side by side and you can see why most people end up selling hours instead. Hours are what is left on the table when both doors are priced out of reach.

I want to be plain about why this matters to me. We were not meant to trade physical effort and time forever. That exchange has been the default arrangement for most people for most of history, and for a long stretch it worked well enough to build a life on. It is fading now. Anyone still planning an entire working life around it is planning around a model that is quietly being withdrawn from under them.

And there is a second limit built into the arrangement, one that has nothing to do with the economy. Effort is not a flat resource across a life. It rises, it peaks, and then it declines — every extra hour buying less than the one before it, until the hours themselves get harder to give. An income made only of effort has no choice but to follow it down.

So there is one question worth running everything through, and it is not a clever one:

If I stop working today, does the money still come?

Try it on the things people are usually sold as side hustles. Freelancing: you stop, it stops. eBay flipping: you stop, it stops. Dropshipping, print-on-demand, driving: you stop, they stop. None of that is bad work, and some of it pays well. But each one is a job wearing the word hustle, because the income is renting your hours, and the rent ends the day you stop paying it.

The split is not about how respectable the work is, or even how well it pays. It is only about whether the thing needs your body in a particular place on a particular day in order to produce anything. That is the line between selling effort and owning something.

A digital product pays neither toll. A workbook, a guide, a course, a set of templates — it costs attention to produce, and the second copy costs exactly what the thousandth copy costs, which is nothing. Write it once. Sell it a thousand times, or twice. The economics of the thing do not care either way.

AI has taken out most of what remained. The research, the structuring, the grind of a first draft — work that used to run into months now runs into days. And it is not only prose. A working spreadsheet model, a small tool, a template system, the kind of thing that genuinely needed a developer three years ago, is now an afternoon for somebody who can describe clearly what they want. So the barrier is no longer capital, no longer credentials, and no longer really the building.

Which brings me to the part that actually decides whether any of this works, and where I watch nearly everyone go wrong. The question is not what you are interested in.

Nobody is going to pay you for your interests. They will pay you to make a problem go away.

And not just any problem. One they are already spending something on — money, or hours, or a workaround they quietly hate. That is the tell. If people are already paying badly to solve something, buying the wrong tool, hiring the wrong help, losing an afternoon every week to a spreadsheet that does not work, then the demand is already proven and you are only offering a better route through it. If nobody is spending anything on it at all, you have not found something early. You have found something people would like solved but will not pay to solve, which is a different thing, and a much more expensive lesson.

Notice that this has nothing to do with your specialisation. The problem does not need to be in your field. It needs to be real, and it needs to have money already moving around it.

I will go further, because I have done it. There are five books I have published that do not carry my name. I understood the problem well enough to write the material, but my own profile was the wrong signal for that particular buyer. The credibility that helps me in one room works against me in another. So I built the persona the material needed and published under a pen name, which writers have done respectably for as long as publishing has existed. The name on the cover is a construction. The problem being solved is completely real, and so is the money.

So here is the practical part. None of the following requires you to work in the field it serves:

• Loop and backing-track packs a church music director can drop straight into a Sunday service
• A cash-flow spreadsheet built for one trade — a barber, a food truck, a small haulier — with their actual cost lines already in it
• Opening and closing checklists for a salon or a restaurant, packaged as a manager's pack
• A ninety-day workbook for somebody stepping into their first supervisor role
• Revision guides or lesson plans built against one specific exam syllabus
• Proposal and presentation templates for a single profession: estate agents, dentists, wedding planners
• A prompt-and-workflow pack for a job drowning in repetitive writing — recruiters, bookkeepers, bid writers
• Sample packs, sound effects, photo presets, CAD files, woodworking plans

None of those is clever. Every one is something somebody currently does badly, or slowly, or pays someone hourly to redo from scratch every time. Format and sector do not matter. Only one rule has to hold, the one that makes a thing an asset rather than a job: you build it once, and you sell it as many times as you like.

I should be honest about what the low barrier costs, because it is not free. Removing the toll did not remove the competition, it relocated it. When anyone can produce a workbook in a weekend, production stops being the scarce thing and judgment becomes the scarce thing: knowing which problem is worth solving, and for whom.

The other honest part: building it is the smallest job in the sequence. Making the thing is maybe a fifth of the work. Getting it in front of the people who have the problem is the rest of it, and that is where most of these quietly die. A product nobody can find is not an asset. It is a file.

So the shape is simple, even though none of the steps are effortless. Find a problem people are already paying to solve. Build the thing once. Put it where those people already are. Then do it again, using what you learned about who actually bought.

But the part I keep returning to is the first one, and it took me longer than it should have to believe it. Nobody is standing at the entrance any more. There is no committee that certifies you to write about how people learn, or how a small business should handle its invoicing, or how to survive the first ninety days of anything. The toll booth is empty. Most people are still queuing at it out of habit.