Your Perspective is a Power Law
In the Age of AI, when the means of creation are available to anyone, the perspective that reframes reality wins. If you want attention and influence, you must cultivate a distinct point of view.
1. Generative AI Replaced Old Spells With New Magic
When everyone’s a wizard, no one’s a wizard.
Up until now, if you could make interesting content, share your ideas, and coin terms, you’d be that one person out of a hundred who stood out. Content took time and effort, having ideas worth sharing demanded energy, and coining terms required a skill with language that most people don’t possess.
Thanks to Generative AI, those barriers to entry and signs of quality are vanishing. You don’t even need creativity at this point. Anyone can magically conjure up anything. What used to take real skill, honed over years, and human ingenuity, can now be replicated by AI in seconds.
You can generate memes on demand, craft viral headlines with a click, have whole articles written in minutes like you’re waving a magic wand, create any image with a spell masquerading as a prompt, make any style of music, produce endless AI-made podcasts where silicon hosts chatter away, and videos of whatever you’d like.
If you thought the internet was noisy already, the volume is being cranked up past 11. Open up any feed, from social media to news, and the firehose has become a constant, electrifying, pulsating, all-consuming, immersive strobe light beaming electrons into your eyes and skull at all times. It’s one opinion, one hot take, after another, in an endless incantation.
If you’re making, building, or selling anything online—how do you get noticed?
When anyone can perform magic tricks with the click of a button, why should anyone care about your stuff? How do you get people to pay attention to you? And how do you turn that attention into influence?
If you have any need or desire to be relevant to anyone—if you want anyone’s attention—if you hope to influence anyone, about anything—there’s only one thing left to double-down on.
You must leverage one of the last remaining Power Laws: Perspective, your Point of View.
In the Age of AI, when the means of creation are available to anyone, anywhere—and everyone can be a memelord—the Perspective that reframes reality wins.
What matters is knowing which perspectives are worth pointing out and sharing—and that would be ideas that you’re uniquely qualified to tell. In other words, you need Perspective-Author Fit.
2. The Difference Between Opinions and a Perspective
This goes beyond stating your opinion, which is what most people think of when they hear the word “perspective”.
Opinions are a personal yet generic, thin view of reality. They can change quickly. Everyone has opinions about anything, all the time. You like chocolate? Good for you. You want to abolish The Federal Reserve? Okay, sure.
Opinions are a subset of your perspective. Without a perspective, your opinions fall flat and sound hollow.
By formulating a perspective, you can frame how others perceive and understand complex issues, ideas, or situations—and influence their view of the world, which also means their opinions.
Why does it work? Because when you have a true perspective, and you coin a term, you imply there’s a pattern, a bigger lens that makes sense of reality, and a repeatable, shareable unit of thought—a way to see the world.
Tyler Cowen's book Talent reveals a compelling pattern: exceptional thinkers create their distinct terms and memes. Tyler does this himself, with 'model this', 'context is that which is scarce', 'solve for the equilibrium', and 'the great stagnation'.
This pattern repeats across influential thinkers: Thiel and Elon Musk ("multiplanetary species", "preserving the light of consciousness") demonstrate it clearly. Similar memetic perspectives appear in the work of Trump, Yudkowsky, Gwern, and so on. This ability to generate sticky terminology, a perspective shift, often signals broader intellectual influence.
When I first tried GPT-2 in 2019, and then GPT-3 in 2020, I could vaguely sense that things were going to change. I decided to attempt formulating talking points, opinions, and perspectives on what I thought would happen.
3. Sharing Opinions versus Coining a Perspective
I spent 2020-2024 strategically discussing concepts like Taste, Perspective, Articulation, Discernment, and more.
I identified key individuals and corporations I wanted to influence and developed a targeted approach to reach them through specific ads, content, DMs, podcast recordings, and private discussions. I even sent snail mail to select individuals.
Over time, I observed my talking points being repeated back to me by the very people I was working on influencing—and by the wider marketplace of AI, art, and technology. For a while, “Discernment” was a thing. Then “Curation”.
At some point, everyone started talking about Taste. Whether it was because I directly influenced someone or not, or because it organically emerged in the online discussion of what it is to be Human in the Age of AI—who knows? But what we do know is that these opinions have emerged, accelerated, reached a peak, and then receded into the weave of the larger conversation.
I’m saying this only to highlight how incredible it is to see talking points, take hold and spread in any particular group online.
I’m not the first, only, or last person to talk about Taste or Curation. But what has surprised me is how my instinct about what topics would matter in the next 10 years proved to be somewhat accurate. It’s an incredible stroke of luck.
Well, it’s part luck, part on purpose. I developed an AI system that predicts emerging talking points in any given marketplace. I gave it a perspective and it mapped out the opinions that go with it.
My perspective of The Revenge of Beauty gained particular traction. After publishing an early draft of the essay, I received multiple private messages from influential figures offering investment opportunities, jobs, and asking if I’d be willing to work with them on various projects.
The latest iteration of my essay has, surprisingly to me, generated more opportunities.
However, this also revealed the challenges of the ownership of ideas in a hyper connected online space. More specifically, a few latched on to The Revenge of Beauty and paraded it around as their own. One person in particular at first discouraged me from talking about it at all, only to repeat my words verbatim a week later, on his X account. As far as I can tell, this is extremely common online.
A perspective has power as a reframe, precisely because others can easily mimic and repeat it, without the need for ownership. Distribution is king in the Age of AI, and that often means an inability to cash in on it.
Throughout all of this, I’m relatively unknown. I don’t have a large audience. My subscriber list is tiny. Very few pay any attention to what I say. I’m not terminally online at all times. My influence and reach should be at or near zero. And yet it often hasn’t been. The impact has been asymmetrical to who I am.
That’s because I stumbled on something I think of as Perspective-Author Fit.
4. The Perspective-Author Fit
Not all perspectives carry the same weight. Some ideas get attention but fizzle out. Other ideas catch on and go viral for a moment. Others become market defining and that’s because of Perspective-Author Fit.
Take, for instance, Founder Mode by Paul Graham.
The concept contrasts the conventional, business-school-taught approach to leading a company—what he calls “manager mode”—with a Founder Mode style of leadership more natural to those who start the company themselves.
The core realization is that the typical managerial playbook, which involves delegating work to qualified subordinates and staying out of the details, doesn’t fully apply to founders. Founders can—and often must—interact with people far below their direct reports, engage deeply with specific projects, and personally set cultural and strategic directions that don’t fit into neat management structures.
With over 16 million views and quite a lot of bookmarks and likes, his idea spread fast and wide.
Not long after Paul published that essay, people were discussing it on social media, podcasts, videos, and memes started cropping up pretty fast:
Why did it have such an instant reach and influence? The instant reach is because “Founder Mode” named something familiar in a new way. The influence is because of who Paul Graham is. His track record, YC, credentials, investing—all of it matters and produces unique perspectives.
At the same time, the underlying idea of “Founder Mode” has been expressed as Maker-Manager Schedule, as three distinct roles in the The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and so on.
Paul wasn’t the first to coin a term for the same concept. But Paul’s version of the same idea succeeded because of his Perspective-Author Fit.
Let me explain this through the lens of an artist.
For an artist to create a visual perspective with dimensions they use vantage points, vanishing points, and a horizontal line.
You see this in drawings, paintings, and visual art:
You create and communicate a Perspective through the use of a Vantage Point and multiple Vanishing Points.
Through your experiences and expertise, you’re collecting and plotting Vantage Points you can stand on. Vanishing Points are things you see coming on the horizon, vibes, ideas, goals, and direction.
You end up offering a compelling Perspective (not necessarily original) that demands a second or third look.
I have spent the past 10+ years working with copywriting, online marketing, building a business, growing brands, growth hacking, working with Machine Learning and Large Language Models—and more outside of the world of business and technology.
This expertise and experiences all add up to Vantage Points I can take a position with. Throughout my career, I’ve collected more Vanishing Points (again, these are ideas, notes, vibes, visions, directions, goals, etc.) than I can count.
When you put them together, you’re communicating a perspective that’s shareable.
Your Perspective on any given idea and topic can be communicated with different perspectives, multiple vanishing points, and various settings.
You stand in one place (Vantage Point) and plot out relevant Vanishing Points. Together, these make up your Perspective on any given idea or topic you have in mind.
The strength, reach, and influence of your Perspective is determined by your Perspective-Author Fit, when your ideas are naturally aligned with your experience and insight that they carry the authentic imprint of your perspective.
You need a mixture of each element to get it right.
You might have an interesting Vanishing Point (vision, idea, goal, direction) but not a convincing Vantage Point (earned expertise or experience). Your influence won’t amount to much even if you reach some kind of spread. You’re probably only sharing opinions here.
You could have a solid Vantage Point but the wrong Vanishing Points. Your spread won’t be far though you might influence a few. It’ll sound interesting for a moment but it won’t last.
You could have a Vantage Point and Vanishing Points but you’re not coining a clear Perspective. Your influence and spread will remain local and won’t make a difference.
When your Vantage Point (earned expertise and experience), Vanishing Points (vision, idea, goal, direction), and coined Perspective (terms/memes) all align perfectly, you create something asymmetrical in influence.
That’s because a sufficiently concentrated Perspective is a Power Law.
5. Perspective is a Power Law
Each element multiplies the others' impact. Your expertise validates your vision, your vision gives weight to your terms, and your terms help others instantly grasp and spread your perspective. Once this alignment clicks, your influence can grow exponentially rather than linearly.
Think of it like this: Your Vantage Point gives you credibility, your Vanishing Points show where things are heading, and your coined terms give people the language to spread your ideas without you being present. When all three lock together, your perspective can spread through networks and conversations you've never directly touched.
This is why some relatively "unknown" people can have outsized influence. They've achieved this three-way alignment. Their terms travel far beyond their personal reach because they're anchored in real expertise and point toward truth on the horizon. The ideas spread themselves because they help others make sense of what they're already seeing.
It's not additive. It's a multiplier, a power law. Each component amplifies the others, creating that power law curve where influence can suddenly scale far beyond your direct connections.
Why? Because we're agents in a network. And in network theory, influence doesn't distribute evenly—it concentrates. The same applies to perspectives. In any network of discourse, certain viewpoints gain outsized traction, snowballing in influence as they resonate with others.
While AI makes information and creation universally accessible, it can't replace the human ability to experience and cultivate revealing perspectives. Instead, it serves as a tool to refine, express, and amplify your point of view. In this environment, the hunting and gathering of Vantage Points is what matters. Humans have always been drawn to voices of clarity that make sense of the world for them—the challenge is ensuring that voice is yours, enhanced but not replaced by AI.
The key is to cultivate your ability to form, articulate, and communicate unique perspectives. Your power in the age of AI is not using AI to mindlessly crank out content and memes, but in developing a Vantage Point that, through its various Vanishing Points of expression, helps others see the world in a new way—a Perspective that acts as a reframe.
Talk again soon,
Samuel Woods
The Bionic Writer