The Market Rewards Legibility

In 1990, a group called Take 6 put out an album that should have ended the conversation. Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder in their corner. Harmonies so advanced that other singers studied them the way you study a textbook. Claude McKnight, the older brother of Brian McKnight, built a vocal group operating at a level almost nobody around them could touch. And yet, when you say early 90s vocal group, most people think Boyz II Men.

This is not a knock on Boyz II Men. I love them. But here is the thing I keep turning over: if music were a pure talent meritocracy, Take 6 would have been the bigger act. They were arguably the more excellent one. So what actually happened?

Here is my theory. The market does not reward excellence. It rewards legibility.

Boyz II Men fit the machinery that already existed. R&B radio, the single, MTV, plainspoken heartbreak over a backbeat. The whole delivery system of 1990 was built to carry exactly what they made. Take 6 made jazz gospel a cappella. Sacred, intricate, no producer driven single, no beat for radio to grab onto. They were not too small for the moment. They were too sophisticated for the channel. The machinery could not carry them, so the world admired them instead of swooning over them.

That distinction matters more than it looks. Because the story is not about a lack of talent. The story is about a lack of infrastructure. When we confuse the two, we end up blaming the artist for a system failure.

I think about this constantly, because it is the exact logic I am building against.
There is a whole population of brilliant, capable, financially intelligent adults who get told they are bad with money. Neurodivergent adults especially.

The truth is they were never bad at anything. The tools were just never built for how their brains actually work. The financial system, like 1990s radio, only carries what is already legible to it. Everyone else gets called deficient when really they were just underserved.

That is why I am building Pistachio Pay, the first trauma informed financial automation platform for neurodivergent adults. Not because these people need fixing. Because the channel does. The most powerful move was never to be undeniable. It was to build the thing that finally makes the undeniable legible.

Take 6 needed a different architecture. So do millions of people sitting in front of financial tools that were never designed for them.

Curb cuts were built for wheelchairs. Everyone ended up using them. 💚