If information was the answer, we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs

Derek Sivers said it plainly enough that it has never needed improving: if more information was the answer, we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs. We have had access to the information required to be healthy, financially secure, and commercially successful for a very long time. Libraries existed before the internet, the internet existed before AI.. but none of it produced the outcome the availability of information implied it should.

People consume information continuously and act on very little of it.

This is not a recent development and it is not a technology problem, its a feature of human behaviour that has remained consistent across every era in which the volume and accessibility of information has increased, which is to say across every era we have any record of.

The reason matters; Information does not change behaviour because behaviour is not primarily governed by information. Its governed by belief, inertia, fear, competing priorities, the gap between knowing what to do and being willing to accept the cost of doing it, and the particular kind of psychological friction that exists between understanding a course of action and actually taking it. These are not problems that better information resolves, they are problems that require someone to sit alongside the person who has the information and help them move through the gap between knowing and doing. Here’s something I wrote on what people actually pay you for.

AI anxiety has reached fever pitch right now whether AI will replicate expertise and therefore replace the experts who currently monetise it. That concern has some validity in certain narrow contexts, and it has been thoroughly addressed elsewhere. What it does not account for is the more fundamental truth that expertise was never primarily about information transfer in the first place, and the clients who pay serious money for advisory relationships were never primarily paying to receive information.

Those clients are paying for real world implementation. For someone to be present in the room when the decision is uncomfortable. For the specific quality of accountability that exists when another person who knows what you should do is watching whether you do it. For the judgment that recognises which of the ten available right answers is the right one given the specific commercial and human architecture of this particular business at this particular moment. None of that was ever in the information, and making the information cheaper and faster to access has not changed that.

The clients who struggle most are not the ones who lack access to good thinking about their problems. Most of them have read the books, listened to the podcasts, consumed the frameworks, attended the events. They can describe their positioning problem with considerable sophistication, they can articulate exactly what their acquisition challenge is and what the theory of solving it looks like. What they cannot do, for reasons that are usually more human than commercial, is implement consistently and at the level of quality required for the work to compound into something.

That gap is the only problem worth solving in advisory work, and it is not a problem AI makes smaller. If anything it makes it larger, because the volume of high-quality information now available to any business owner with a laptop means the distance between what they know and what they are doing grows wider with every passing month. More information, more frameworks, more AI-generated strategic options, more directions that are all theoretically correct.. and the same human being on the other side of all of it, still needing someone to help them choose and act.

Sivers wrote that line as a provocation, but today more than ever it describes a genuine and stable feature of how people actually work. The expert who understands this is not threatened by the proliferation of information or the increasing sophistication of the tools that generate it. They are valuable precisely because the information was never the scarce thing.

What people need is not more to read, they need someone who has walked the same path to help them ‘DO’ it.