Information Isn't Free

"Information wants to be free" was a rallying cry from technologists in the 90s. "Ideas are worthless" was the accepted wisdom of the startup world in the 00s. (It was, and still is, all about the execution.)

Both of those statements may be true in the general sense but not in every sense. Particularly not when it comes to an individual.

I am now 44-years-old and growing increasingly aware of the limits of my time. I have about 2,000 weeks of life left. My time itself is the single largest price paid for the consumption of information. At some point within the last decade I transitioned from someone who valued money more than time to time more than money when it came to learning. I'm self-taught on most of skills that I use in my career and spent years of time exploring the comment sections of online forums to learn new ideas and ways of thinking.

Now I will gladly pay for shortcuts. Books, courses, conferences, and coaching all provide curated information and distill vast topics and experiences down to more concise format. They provide clarity. They are available when you need them.

Getting one actionable idea out of a $30 business book purchased at the airport can provide a 10x, 100x, or 1,000x ROI. One insight in a coaching call (let me introduce you to Cara-Lyn Giovanniello ) can remove the mental block that was holding one back. A course can provide a framework that eases the path to success.

Paying for information is making an investment in yourself.

In the past couple of years, large language models have set out to consume the world's information and provide it to us in the digestible format of a conversation. The impact of this largely will not be known for many years. I also think that paradigm will shift as we feed more of our personal data into these models and start getting the output tailored to our lives.

(My current wish is that I had an AI as my personal assistant and accountability partner but I need the model to break out of the barrier of the chat window and to be able to read my calendar, access my to do list, and communicate with me via email.)

Where those models fail, and which is the strength of the previously mentioned content, is experience. ChatGPT may be able to give me advice on building a sales process but it hasn't actually done so. Pete Kazanjy (@kazanjy) has done so and has written a great book about it (Founding Sales). His advice is more valuable to me because it is the result of his dedication, ingenuity, sweat, and tears. (I don't actually know if there were tears involved.)

The nominal monetary cost of AI (well worth it IMHO) is still dwarfed by the cost of time to verify the information they provide. That itself is dwarfed by the cost of trusting the information. One shouldn't blindly accept any information at face value but it is easier to trust an expert. While ChatGPT may be able to pass the bar exam it is not an experienced attorney. It has never filed a motion, seen the inside of a courtroom, or looked someone in the eye.

I still learn by doing and AI is a tool I use. But I still find that the most valuable information and ideas come to me through my experience or by reading about the experience of others. Those are lessons that I gladly pay for.