Founder, President, and CEO @ guru media hub/outcome media
Jay is the founder of SubjectLine.com, the world’s leading free subject line rating tool. As CEO of GURU Media Hub, he leads a powerhouse team that executes 40,000+ marketing campaigns each year for some of the world’s most iconic brands and produces the largest virtual marketing events on the planet, attracting 50,000+ attendees annually. Jay also hosts the podcast “Do This, Not That: For Marketers.
Jay SchwedelsonThe Next 5 Years Will Not Reward the Smartest People
Jay Schwedelson opened with a confession rather than a credential. He runs an agency and a media company with around 100 people, and his first move on the main stage was to tell the room he had “screwed up everything” and does “everything wrong”. What followed was a deliberately unpolished argument about where advantage actually comes from now that the world has changed: not from being the cleverest person in the organisation, but from being the most consistent, the most human, and the most willing to keep going after everyone else has quietly stopped.
This recap follows the talk’s own logic — dismantle the myth of the smartest person, replace motivation with homework, and then look at what persistence, courage and a different relationship with AI make possible. Where the slides are the primary evidence, they are described as they appeared on screen.
The talk began with the speaker still rattled by the act before him. “I can’t believe the last speaker on the stage went to the moon, and I just met her,” he said, before admitting that the closest he had come to anything lunar was mooning somebody at the age of eleven — a line he very nearly delivered to her face before an internal voice intervened: “shut up, Jay.” It is a small piece of stagecraft, but it sets the register for everything that follows. This was not a talk delivered from above the audience.
“I’m Jay Schwedelson. You don’t care,” he continued. “I have an agency and a media company, about 100 or so people, but I’m one of you.” The self-description that followed was blunt: he has screwed up everything, he does everything wrong, and the world has changed anyway. He also signalled that the material would cost him something: “I’m going to be very real. I’ve never said any of this publicly. I’m going to embarrass myself, but that’s okay.”
That willingness to be unimpressive on purpose is the argument in miniature. If the coming years belong to people rather than to résumés, then the first credential worth showing is honesty about your own failure rate. The thesis arrived almost immediately afterwards, and the rest of the session simply supplied the evidence.
“We have to be humans, because the next five years will not be won by the smartest people.”
“Good news?” he said of his own thesis. “Extremely qualified for this speech.” His impatience with credentialism was immediate: when somebody tells you they have seven degrees and got A grades in everything, the honest reaction is “who cares?” Same for the GPA. Same, he added, for the tattoo you have been talking yourself out of. Nobody cares.
Then he put his actual college transcript on the screen — University of Florida, 1996 — because he had found it and decided the room should see it. Statistics took him three attempts and ended in a C+, achieved, he claimed, with the help of peripheral vision. He runs an advertising agency; he received a C in advertising strategy. “Do you know how crazy that is?”
He showed the same document to his own children during their college years, and they drew the obvious teenage conclusion: “so we shouldn’t try?” His correction matters, because it is the hinge of the whole talk. “No, that’s not the message.” The message is not that effort is pointless. It is that the scoreboard people spend their twenties optimising for turns out to be a poor predictor of what happens next — and a spectacularly poor excuse for not starting.
For the record, there was one A on the page: weightlifting. “So, well, you could all screw off.” The laugh landed, and with it the pivot: if brilliance is not the differentiator, what is? “So how are we going to win the next five years?”
He promised two things, and pre-empted the groan. “You’re like, oh no, this is like generic, high level. No, I don’t talk high level. I’m like 10 foot level.” The stated intention was to get into the weeds on things the audience could act on immediately, which is a rarer commitment on a main stage than it should be.
The first observation was almost mundane: in our jobs and our businesses, we learn by doing. We keep doing the job, and improvement is supposed to arrive as a by-product. Against that, he set the vast motivational economy most of us consume — including, generously, a podcaster he genuinely admires. “I love her. I listen to her podcast all the time. But we don’t need more motivation.”
“We need something that is due. We need homework.”
The distinction is sharper than it first sounds. Motivation is a feeling you rent; homework is an obligation with a deadline attached. He then broke a presentation rule on purpose, putting up a slide dense with words — “my slides are so ugly, who cares?” — and told the room this was the most important thing they could do for their lives, and that it would be very annoying: you need to hold yourself accountable.
The operational question arrived in five words on a poster-style slide: “What’s your weekly thing?” Not your quarterly objective, not your five-year plan — the recurring, time-boxed commitment that exists every single week whether or not you feel like it. The slide itself listed short, time-based activities of the kind anyone could schedule.
“What is the thing that you’re doing every week?” he asked, and then closed the escape route that most audiences reach for: “I don’t care if you’re a marketing manager that just got hired.” Seniority is not a prerequisite for having a weekly thing, and being junior is not a reason to wait for permission. The commitment scales down to whatever your current remit allows.
The next card on screen extended the thought — “If nobody is expecting…” — and the implication is one anyone who has abandoned a personal project will recognise: a commitment with no witness and no due date rarely survives its first genuinely busy week. Homework works because somebody is waiting for it. Manufacturing that expectation is therefore part of the work, not an afterthought.
Read practically, this is a design problem rather than a willpower problem. Pick something small enough to repeat, fix it to a day, and attach it to a person or an audience who will notice its absence. The point is not the individual output; it is the accumulation that a year of Tuesdays produces while everyone else is still gathering motivation.
If the weekly thing is the mechanism, this is the reason it works. The slide put it as a question and an answer in one breath: “Your superpower? Everybody else quits.” Beneath the headline sat a short stack of statistics on how quickly people abandon what they start — the quiet attrition that happens in every team, every content calendar and every new initiative once the novelty wears off.
It is an unusually forgiving definition of competitive advantage. You do not have to be the best strategist in your category, or the most credentialled person in the meeting. You have to still be publishing, still be calling, still be shipping in month nine, when the field has thinned out on its own. Persistence is the one input that compounds without requiring a higher GPA.
It is also why the earlier transcript reveal is more than a comedy beat. A C in advertising strategy did not stop him building an advertising agency, because the qualifying test was never the exam — it was whether he was still there years later. In an environment where everyone has access to the same tools and the same advice, showing up repeatedly is a genuinely scarce behaviour.
One card dominated the auditorium in enormous type: “10 seconds of brave.” It is the emotional counterpart to the weekly thing. Consistency covers the long horizon; the ten seconds cover the moment where most good ideas actually die — the instant before you hit send, raise your hand, ask for the meeting, or say the uncomfortable true thing out loud.
The framing is deliberately small. Nobody is being asked to become a fearless person; they are being asked to tolerate a brief, specific discomfort. That is a far more realistic ask, and it is repeatable in the same way a weekly commitment is repeatable.
The talk had already modelled it twice over. Opening with a self-deprecating joke about the previous speaker, and then projecting a real transcript full of mediocre grades in front of a full auditorium, are both ten-second decisions that most people would quietly decline to make. He had warned the room at the start: “I’m going to embarrass myself, but that’s okay.” The brave part was never the slide — it was the second before it appeared.
The second half of the session turned to technology, and the stage card set the terms plainly: “Win by using AI differently…” The emphasis sits on the final word. Not more AI, not earlier AI, not a bigger stack — differently.
That framing follows logically from everything before it. If the smartest people are no longer the automatic winners, it is partly because raw analytical horsepower has become cheap and widely distributed. When every competitor can generate a competent brief, a competent email and a competent campaign in seconds, competence stops functioning as a differentiator at all.
What remains is the human layer the talk kept returning to: the weekly discipline, the willingness to be publicly imperfect, and the ten seconds of nerve that produce work nobody else would have risked. The implication for teams is that the AI question worth asking is not “how do we adopt this?” but “what does this free us to do that only people can do?”
True to the promise of never having said any of this publicly, the closing stretch became more personal. One slide simply announced “I went full woo-woo”, followed by a list of the habits and choices that phrase covered — the kind of admission that is easy to mock from the safety of an audience seat and genuinely awkward to make from a stage.
Another card explained a decision with disarming directness: “Cause I realised how hard new authors try!” It is a small line with a large idea inside it. Noticing effort in other people — particularly people with no leverage, no audience and no obligation on you — is exactly the human behaviour the talk had been arguing for since its opening minute.
The proof point was put on screen without ceremony: a book cover alongside the figure $130,000 raised for cancer research. It is the neatest possible summary of the whole argument. Nobody was persuaded by a transcript, a GPA or a degree count. Something got made, it kept going, and the result was a number that mattered to people outside the room.
Stripped of the jokes, the session was an argument for replacing self-image with behaviour. Intelligence and credentials are treated as sunk costs — interesting, unearned, largely irrelevant to the next five years. What is left is a short list of things anyone can start on a Monday, regardless of title, tenure or transcript.
Or, as the man with an A in weightlifting and a C in advertising strategy put it before the deck was three minutes old: we have to be humans, because the next five years will not be won by the smartest people.