Look for the Past-Tense Verb

01Two status updates

Read those again and look only at the verbs. The first update is written in the language of activity: working on, went through, had calls. It tells the manager that time was spent. It does not say whether anything is different now.

The second update is a list of things that became true: went out, approved, confirmed. The manager could check each one, and each one moves the company closer to money.

After six months, one of those two people will be seen as someone who gets things done. The difference between them may be nothing more than how they have learned to see their own work.

In the first piece in this series I argued that you should treat your first employer as Customer Number One, and that what a customer actually buys is a state change: a prospect becomes a client, a vulnerable system becomes a secure one, an open role becomes a filled one. This piece is about how to see state changes clearly, because once you can see them, you can start choosing the valuable ones.

02Work has tenses

The simplest tool I know for this is grammar.

Activity lives in the present progressive: I’m working on it, looking into it, following up, handling it, reviewing it. Those phrases are comfortable because they are always true while you are busy, and they never have to end.

Outcomes live in the past tense: published, booked, approved, signed, shipped, installed, collected, resolved. Each of those marks a moment when the world changed. Before it, the thing was not true. After it, it was.

Figure 01 The same week, in two tenses

Activity · present progressive

• working on
• looking into
• following up
• handling
• reviewing

Always true while you’re busy. Has no finish line. Can’t be checked.

State · past tense

• sent
• approved
• signed
• shipped
• resolved

True or false. Marks a finish line. Someone can check it.

None of this means activity is fake. Every outcome is built out of activity. But your customer is not paying for the activity. They are paying for whatever the activity makes true, and the past-tense verb is where you can see it.

• Published
• Booked
• Approved
• Signed
• Closed
• Shipped
• Installed
• Launched
• Produced
• Renewed
• Collected
• Resolved

03Three tests for a real finish line

Not every past-tense verb carries the same weight. “Discussed” is past tense, and so is “tried.” So when I’m deciding whether a verb marks a real outcome, I run it through three tests.

Figure 02 Does this verb mark a real state change?

1. It already happenedIt points to a moment in the past, not an ongoing effort. “Sent,” not “sending.”
2. It’s binaryIt is either true or false. There is no such thing as 70 percent signed. If you catch yourself giving a percentage, you haven’t found the verb yet.
3. Someone else can confirm itSomeone other than you could check it: the counterparty, the bank statement, the machine log, the regulator’s letter.

The third test matters most, and it leads straight to the central idea of this piece.

04Why some verbs are worth more

Think about a proposal and the verbs it can pass through: drafted, sent, approved, signed, paid.

All five are genuine state changes, but they are not equally valuable. The reason is easy to miss: each step down the chain needs more of the world to cooperate.

Figure 03 Who has to say yes

VerbWho must cooperateHow far into reality

• DraftedYou, alone
• SentYou, plus a working channel
• ApprovedYour own organization
• SignedAnother company’s decision-maker
• PaidTheir finance team and their bank
• RenewedThe customer, a year later, after using it

“Drafted” is entirely in your hands. “Signed” depends on a stranger in another building deciding to trust you. “Renewed” depends on that stranger using the thing for a year and still being glad they bought it.

That is why the downstream verbs are worth more. They are harder, and they carry risk. You can do everything right and the deal still doesn’t close. The premium paid to people who reliably make those verbs happen is, in large part, payment for carrying that risk.

Travel shows the same pattern in miniature. The customer never really wanted an itinerary. They wanted to be in Mumbai on Tuesday morning, with a room waiting and a meeting starting at 10:00.

Figure 04 From intention to actual

1. Preparedan itinerary exists
2. Bookeda seat is held
3. Confirmedthe hotel has the room
4. Checked inthe traveler is moving
5. Arrivedin the room at 10:00, Tuesday

IntentionActual

05Fifty artifacts and one verb

Picture a company negotiating a $4 million contract. By the late stages there might be fifty artifacts around it: email threads, term sheets, redlines, a pricing model, two decks, a draft agreement and three rounds of legal comments.

Then someone gets on a plane. Two days later the CEO asks one question, and it has a yes-or-no answer: Did it close?

Every artifact helped. The person who drafted the agreement may have done beautiful work, and the analyst who built the model may have been indispensable. But the person who moved the deal from open to closed is operating on a different economic level, and nobody in the building is confused about that.

Artifacts are evidence that work happened. Outcomes are evidence that reality changed.

This is also why salespeople get paid what they do. A salesperson calls, emails, presents, quotes, follows up and negotiates, and those are all real steps. But the company’s attention locks onto one verb, closed, because at that moment money outside the company starts coming in. The salesperson’s contribution is easy to value because it sits so close to a change everyone cares about. They didn’t produce something related to revenue. They changed the revenue.

06What AI does to the ladder

This is where your generation’s situation differs from mine.

AI is extraordinarily good at the verbs you control alone: drafted, designed, analyzed, modeled, summarized, coded, formatted. Those are the steps at the top of the ladder, where only you have to cooperate. The cost of making them true is falling toward zero.

What AI has not collapsed, at least not yet, is the cost of the verbs that need someone else’s yes. A counterparty still has to sign. A regulator still has to approve. A customer still has to renew. A machine on a factory floor still has to run.

Put those two facts together and you get the most important career implication I know of: as artifact verbs get cheaper, the value moves downstream. The artifact your AI made in ten minutes is worth less than it would have been in 2016, precisely because it took ten minutes. The signature is not.

So be careful about falling in love with the artifact. At twenty-four it is easy to get intoxicated by what your AI can produce: look at this report, this model, this deck, this site. It is all impressive, and the right response to all of it is the same question: what changed? Did the customer sign? Did the product ship? Did the payment arrive? Did the permit get approved?

There is good news on the other side of the same fact. AI doesn’t only make artifacts cheap. It takes over the upstream steps that used to fill your whole job, which means one person can now own much more of the chain. The drafting, formatting, research, scheduling and follow-up that once passed through five people can pass through you and your coworker. That lets you report a different kind of sentence:

Instead of“I created the presentation.”

You can say“The proposal was delivered.”

Instead of“I prepared the contract.”

You can say“The agreement was signed.”

Instead of“I wrote the deployment plan.”

You can say“The system was deployed.”

Instead of“I wrote the machining instructions.”

You can say“The first production run was completed.”

That is what I mean when I say AI is economically transformative for a young person. It lets you reach further down the causal chain than your title says you should.

07The factory floor

Manufacturing makes all of this physical, which is why I like it as an example.

Figure 05 Prototype to full production

1. WrittenThe CNC instruction file exists.
2. LoadedThe instructions are on the machine.
3. CalibratedThe machine is dialed in to spec.
4. ProducedA physical part exists that did not exist before.
5. RampedTen parts, then a hundred, then five thousand.
6. In full productionThe operation itself has changed state.

The person who wrote the instruction file did real, necessary work. Nothing downstream happens without it. But the executive who takes a line from ramp to full production is generally paid far more. That isn’t because the file didn’t matter. It’s because that executive’s state change is bigger: it involves more machines, more people, more suppliers and more ways to fail, and it reaches much further into the physical world.

08Four habits to start this week

All of this is useless unless it changes what you do on a Tuesday. Here is what I would do in your first year.

1. Ask for the verb when you get the work

   “Work on the proposal” is not an assignment. It’s a mood. Ask, or quietly work out: what past-tense verb means this is done? Drafted, reviewed, sent, approved and signed are five very different jobs with five very different deadlines, and most early-career frustration comes from guessing the wrong one.

2. Write every update in past tense

   Take working on, looking into and touching base out of your status updates. Report what became true, then what you expect to become true next and by when. If nothing became true this week, say so plainly. That is more credible than a paragraph of activity.

3. Find the next verb

   Whatever verb your work currently ends on, ask what comes after it. Then ask whether you, with your AI coworker handling the upstream steps, could own that one too.

4. Move one rung, not five

   You don’t need to own “closed” in year one. You need to own one verb further down than your job description says. Do that every year and within five years you’ll be the person senior people describe as someone who makes things happen.

Figure 06 If your verb is this, look at what comes next

Your verb now	Further downstream
Drafted	Sent → Approved → Signed
Designed	Built → Installed → Operating
Analyzed	Decided → Implemented → Improved
Proposed	Funded → Approved → Launched
Contacted	Qualified → Converted → Closed

You will notice something as you practice this. Senior people already talk this way. The plant is operational. The acquisition closed. The financing was secured. The system was restored. The customer renewed. They talk in states because they are held accountable for states. Nobody asks a CFO how busy the finance team was. They ask whether the books closed.

You can start talking and thinking that way at twenty-four. There is no reason to wait until you are fifty.

09Where the test gets hard

John Rector is an entrepreneur and co-founder of E2open who now runs Charleston AI in Charleston, South Carolina. He writes about artificial intelligence, work, and what changes when production becomes cheap.