Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.

Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.

The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.

But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.

Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.

One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.

However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.

A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.

In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.