An intern with ChatGPT can do better than you… unless you have this superpower.
Over the past 25 years, I have hired and worked with many people on different projects. Some developed brilliantly, others stagnated or failed. For my hiring, I developed a precise framework. But what few people know, even among those hired successfully, is that a single element matters more to me than all the others.
When I receive an application, even before reading it, I send a document presenting the expected mindset. This document has evolved over time, but its essence remains unchanged. Few know it, yet apart from rare emergency hires, 99% of the outcome of an application is decided at this stage.
Why place so much importance on mindset? Because it is what lets me detect, beyond whether we can work together, the only superpower that really interests me.
Skills are acquired. Today, with all knowledge within our reach, learning has become relatively easy: read, memorise, repeat. In the age of AI, where assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the like are within everyone's reach, the boundary between the person who has learned and the person who masters a tool becomes blurred. Technical knowledge alone is no longer enough.
In many fields, particularly tech, it has become difficult to distinguish a seasoned engineer from an intern who is very gifted at prompt engineering.
And yet, some individuals shine differently. They radiate something. Curiously, and more particularly in tech, people try to avoid them; they disturb, they upset the balance and the established mediocrity. Many hate them, but I adore them: the superheroes.
Why? Because in 2025, without human augmentation, it is already impossible for a human to match the speed at which machines learn. They read, compile, synthesise thousands of pages in a few seconds. However, there remains one major difference between them and certain humans: a superpower they have not yet managed to acquire: understanding!.
Understanding is not learning. Understanding is connecting invisible dots that the data do not seem to connect. It is perceiving a logic where it seems absent. It is deducing truths hidden behind what seems obvious but misleads us. It is anticipating the real consequences, solving problems at the root, sometimes and even often against what the visible data suggest.
It is this spark that I look for around me, both personally and professionally. Besides, every time I have prioritised deep understanding and mindset over the rest, the results have *always* followed. Learning skims the surface; understanding digs.
the eyes see only the surface of things; do not trust that.(Obi-Wan Kenobi)
Careful: I am not minimising the value of learning. It is valuable, even essential to understanding things. But it is not that which distinguishes us from machines. Today, if we refer to our own intelligence, the machine merely imitates it; it pretends to understand. It analyses data perfectly, but it does not think. It does not feel an idea. AI does not grasp what goes beyond appearances.
For my part, at the stage we have reached, I think it is rather another form of intelligence, different from ours, independent of consciousness and the experience of thinking; nevertheless it is no less formidable! I am also convinced that over the coming years, other models will be capable of deep understanding, and that we will witness a revolution much deeper than what most people imagine (or do not imagine, for that matter), but that is another story.
Understanding is also being capable of imagining what the data do not yet show. Of running thought experiments. Of inventing impossible situations… then of using them to make progress in the real world.
Do you want to stay indispensable for a few more years?
Learn to understand.
Thinking is not knowing.
Knowing is not understanding.Only those who understand will understand 😉
—
Christophe Casalegno
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