To all my dear friends in the marketing, author, consulting, speaking, and coaching communities, if I could only tell you one thing, it would be this…
It doesn’t matter how absolutely, fucking brilliant you are at an old model. When that model dies, you adapt or become collateral damage in the crash.
Last post, I shared a case study of how I paid a LinkedIn consultant ten grand and then proceeded to ignore essentially every piece of advice he gave me.
Why?
Because of what I wrote above. He was teaching how to spam and pitch people, to try and sell them what I know. But that’s a dead model. And no matter how great you are at marketing or persuasion, dead is dead.
I use channels like LinkedIn and YouTube to build signal. Not reach. Not engagement. Signal. And here's the part that trips people up: I'm not giving away my knowledge. My knowledge is essentially worthless, because you can get it from a chatbot for free. I'm giving away my thinking. Those are different products, and only one of them still has a market.
Well that post generated a lot of response, especially on LinkedIn. My friend Art DMed me to say he thought 90 percent of the people who read that post would come away discouraged.
He suggested that most readers would see me as a guy producing long-form content with an actual point of view, week after week, and they'd do the math on themselves and realize they'd run out of things to say inside of a month. Art wasn't being a jerk. He was being honest. And he was probably right about the 90 percent.
As I told him back, that’s exactly the point I’m making. A lot of people would run out of things to say because they’re not thought leaders. They’re thought repeaters. And they’re used to being paid as thought leaders, because before AI, you could create that perception just by reporting or repeating facts.
Those days are over.
A thought repeater curates. They summarize the book they just read, restate the framework they learned on the webinar, remix the same seven productivity tips that have been circulating since 2011. I am continually gobsmacked at what authors, consultants, and speakers put out and call content:
Kill. Me. Now.
To be fair, these thought repeaters aren’t lying to anyone. They're often quite good at it with flashy slides, bespoke suits, and power haircuts.
A great thought leader is like getting a visit from someone in the future.
They've been in the arena, gotten it wrong, paid for it, adjusted, and come back with something the rest of us didn't already know. They have points of view that cost them something to hold. Thought leaders don’t get paid for what they know, they get paid for what they think.
The thought repeater's inventory is finite by definition. You can only repeat what already exists. That’s why my last post scared them. They haven’t had an original thought since the Bush Administration. (The first one.)
The thought leader's inventory is infinite — because they're generating it, not retrieving it. Now look at what's happening in the market right now and tell me which one of those two is in trouble.
For about forty years, the business model underneath our entire industry was information arbitrage. You knew something. Your prospect didn't. That gap was the product. You packaged the gap into a book, a keynote, a course, a coaching container, a consulting retainer — and the gap paid your mortgage. It was a beautiful model while it lasted. I built a good chunk of my life on it.
But now it's dead. Put a wreath on the coffin and move on…
Because the thing you know is now available instantly, for free or close to it, in a better-organized format, at three in the morning, from a machine that never gets tired of your questions and never makes you feel stupid for asking them.
If your value proposition is "I have information you lack," you are competing directly against a technology that has all the information and none of your overhead. That is not a fight you are going to win because you’ve already lost it.
And here's the cray-cray part nobody wants to hear…
The better you are at the old model, the more dangerous your position is.
Because the people getting wiped out first aren't the mediocre ones. They're the ones who mastered it. They're the ones with the certifications, the shelf of frameworks, the twenty-year track record of being the best in the room at explaining a thing. It’s like being the world’s preeminent manufacturer of VHS tapes. Congratulations Boo. You’re going to raise skinny children.
The new model is selling what you think…
Nobody needs your information anymore. They need your judgment.
They need to know what you'd do. What you believe. What you've stopped believing and why. Where the conventional wisdom is wrong and what it's costing people. What you see coming that they don't.
That's not retrievable. That's not summarizable. That's not a prompt away. That's the accumulated residue of a specific human being making specific decisions in specific conditions and paying specific prices — and it is the last thing in the speaker/writing/consulting/coaching/marketing business that can't be commoditized.
So Art, if you’re reading this, when you say most people would run out of things to say in a few weeks, I don't hear a reason to soften the message. It feels like I should scream it louder.
If you can't fill a month with original thought about the work you've supposedly devoted your career to…you probably don’t have a content problem. You probably have a thinking problem. (Or worse — you may have built a business on being an excellent narrator of other people's ideas, and the narration job just got automated.)
Believe me, I’m not saying this stuff to be an arrogant jerk. (I’m really an arrogant nice guy; just ask my mom.) I'm not sneering at these people from some safe distance. I put myself through Cherokee Middle School selling weed and been an entrepreneur ever since. I’ve had huge wins and bitter failures. I've stood in front of a room selling something the market had quietly stopped wanting and told myself the problem was the room.
Better you hear it here now from me, than have the Universe say it to you eighteen months from now in the form of a bankruptcy. If you want to have a prosperous business in the AI age, you need to bring something to the party that AI can’t bring.
A point of view. Not a summary of the debate. A side.
Actual IP. Something you built, not something you attended.
Judgment. The ability to tell someone what to do when the data is ambiguous and the stakes are real.
Scar tissue. You can't prompt your way to having lost money, been embezzled from, or had to layoff 2,000 people.
Stop trying to produce content calendars and start producing content that matters. Figure out what problem you solve, who you solve it for, and how you do that differently than anyone else. Then publish your work and your receipts to the world. (Like I did with my LinkedIn and YouTube case studies.)
If you’re still feeling discouraged, that might be a good thing. But don’t stay there. Let me suggest four action steps to kickstart your journey to having something worth saying:
Go get new raw material. Original points of view are downstream of original experience. You cannot think anything new while consuming the same groupthink everyone is spewing on social media. Take on the harder client. Run the experiment that might embarrass you. Go somewhere you're not the smartest person in the room.
Write down five things you believe that most people in your field don't. If you can't get to five, that's your assignment for the next quarter. You can't lead thought you haven't had.
Publish the thing that makes you slightly anxious. The post you're scared to put your name on is usually the only one carrying actual signal. Fear is a decent proxy for originality — safe ideas don't produce adrenaline.
Stop protecting a position that no longer exists. The hardest part of all of this isn't strategic, it's emotional. Letting go of "I'm the person who knows X" when knowing X is now free requires you to grieve an identity. Most people won't do it. They'll spend the next three years defending the old model with increasingly sophisticated arguments about why it's actually coming back.
It isn't coming back.
The market is not going to reward you for how well you learned the last game. It never has. We just haven't had a shift this violent in long enough that a whole generation of us forgot.
Every model dies. This one happened to die on our watch.
So the question isn't whether you're good. You’re probably very good. A lot of people who are about to get flattened are very, very good.
One of the most talked about chapters in my Mad Genius book is the one about scheduling weekly “thinking time.” No devices, just you, a journal, a pen, and a drink. Becoming the “thinker of the thought” – thinking about what to think about. If you want to try it out, here’s a question to get you started…
If tomorrow morning, the market stopped paying you for what you know, would you have anything to say?
Because that’s the business now.
Peace,
- RG
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