During the California Gold Rush, plenty of people chased gold. The more durable opportunity was often making the tools that helped other people search: shovels, pans, maps, logistics, and infrastructure.
That metaphor maps cleanly to platform work. I like building the tools, paths, and systems that help many other engineers move faster and with less friction.
In practice, “always make shovels” means looking for the repeatable leverage point: the pipeline, the local-dev flow, the configuration system, the incident workflow, or the internal platform that turns one painful problem into a solved class of problems.