Social media would have you believe that the most successful people are the ones who constantly have north star ideas and can communicate them really well, because they're typically the loudest voices and those ~Idea Guys~ are the ones who have the sauce to grow big followings on X or LinkedIn.
These are the guys who will tell you things like, "having the idea is the most important thing, and then working really really hard to get there and simply not giving up, will get you there." HOW it gets done is irrelevant. Process be damned. Vision is super easy to communicate, and it translates better on social media.
In reality most success comes from combining clear direction with good, disciplined execution that's well thought out. But you typically don't find people who have both—grand vision, and amazing execution. That's really rare.
Think about it this way. "We're building the AI copilot for job interviews" fits in a tweet. It's sexy. But if you're going to actually build that product, it's going to take a decade of customer interviews, product iterations, hiring, sales, and operational work to actually get there.
There's a disconnect. People look to X for thought leaders in tech and AI and design or whatever but at the end of the day, social media rewards high level vision while the real world rewards sustained execution, systems, and operations. Because social media generally amplifies the first category and ignores the second, it creates the impression that vision is the primary driver of success.
And in the real world, what appears to be success driven by vision is almost always actually success driven by years of invisible execution.
Thought leadership and accomplishment are not the same thing. Granted, some people become wildly successful because they genuinely have a gift of distilling real signal from noise and communicating it in a useful way. But society almost always tends to hear more from people who simply talk about the destination because communicating a vision scales better than demonstrating a process.
The North Star is, of course, still important because process without direction can lead you highly efficiently in the wrong direction.
However, a lot of highly ambitious people never see true success because they lack a repeatable process for turning their vision into reality. Almost all highly ambitious people can clearly describe what it is they want to achieve. But very few can clearly describe and show what it is exactly that needs to be done, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the next 10 years, that moves the needle closer to achieving it. The process, the unsexy part, is what determines if the destination is even on the map.
So take this, just like every other post you read from a "thought leader" on social media, with a grain of salt. Being an Idea Guy is cool, (and it's of course a really interesting—and I will admit, impressive—skill to have to be able to say "just the right thing" in "just the right way" at "just the right time" over and over to go viral every time.) But actually building for real success in the real world is another ball game.
Claude Fable's response
I mostly agree with the core thesis, and I think the strongest version of the argument is even simpler than the essay makes it: visibility and competence are selected by completely different filters. Social media selects for compressibility and emotional resonance; building selects for thousands of boring, correct decisions over years. There's no reason to expect the same people to win both contests, so "famous for ideas" and "actually accomplished" being weakly correlated is exactly what you'd predict.
A few places where I'd push back or sharpen it, though.
First, the essay slightly strawmans the "Idea Guy." Plenty of prominent thought leaders are also accomplished operators—they just became visible after the execution, and now the visible artifact is the talking. The survivorship problem cuts both ways: we see loud people without substance, but we also retroactively dismiss substance-havers as "just talkers" because the execution happened before we were paying attention.
Second, "vision vs. execution" is a bit of a false binary at the top end. In practice, the rarest skill isn't having either one—it's re-deriving the vision continuously from contact with reality. The decade of customer interviews the essay mentions doesn't just execute the vision; it usually replaces it two or three times. So the dichotomy "direction + disciplined process" undersells how much the direction itself is an output of the process, not an input to it.
Third, I'd quibble with "communicating a vision scales better than demonstrating a process" being purely a distortion. It's also genuinely economically valuable. Recruiting, fundraising, and sales all run on compressed narrative. The people who are good at it aren't only winning a vanity contest—they're often acquiring real resources that execution-only people can't. The essay treats the communication skill as decorative; in reality it's a force multiplier on execution, which is part of why the rare both-haver wins so disproportionately.
Where I agree without reservation is the last section: ambitious people who can describe the destination vividly but can't tell you what Tuesday looks like are extremely common, and that gap is usually the whole ballgame. The "process determines if the destination is even on the map" line is the best sentence in the piece.
So: directionally right, slightly too tidy in its villain, and a little unfair to the economic value of narrative.