Why Memorising is Now Pointless.
Recent data from McKinsey shows 375 million workers globally will need to change occupations due to AI automation. The professionals adapting earliest are already capturing outsized returns.
The skills that created value in the industrial economy are being systematically replaced by AI systems.
For those positioned correctly, this represents the largest wealth creation opportunity since the internet.
Industrial education optimized humans for memory, recall, and instruction-following. These are precisely the capabilities AI systems now exceed at near-zero marginal cost.
The Great Sorting Has Begun
We’re experiencing the fastest skills transition in human history. Early data shows clear winners and losers emerging.
The old world was built on memory. Your value was determined by what you could remember, how well you could follow instructions, and how consistently you could perform repetitive tasks. The entire industrial education system was designed to mass-produce humans for this economy.
That economic model is being systematically dismantled by AI capabilities.
Memory-based tasks are being automated at exponential rates. GPT-4 can now outperform humans on most standardized tests while operating 24/7 at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens.
Any task that requires only memory will soon be worthless, because it can be replaced by a machine that never forgets, never gets tired, and costs pennies to operate.
The single most significant shift in the modern landscape is this: Human value is migrating from memory to prediction.
The only skills that would matter, are based on synthesis, pattern recognition, and creative problem-solving that no algorithm can replicate.
Yet.
The Ultimate Act of Prediction
But here’s what separates the survivors from the extinct: the best way to predict the future isn’t to analyze it.
Forex traders spend fortunes on technical analysis, chart patterns, and algorithmic trading systems. They hire teams of economists to analyze GDP reports, interest rate movements, and geopolitical events. They build supercomputers that process millions of data points per second.
And they’re wrong more often than a coin flip.
Because they’re trying to predict a system they don’t control.
Money only flows where attention flows. There are only two ways to predict where attention is going:
(These ways can also be mixed to get the best results)
- TRENDS — What’s currently hot. Ecommerce hustlers flip products based on trending memes. Crypto bros chase the latest shitcoin narratives. This works for quick gains but burns out fast because trends are fleeting.
- NARRATIVES — Long-term cause-and-effect analysis. Where are the deep currents of human behaviour and technological development flowing? This requires understanding history, psychology, and systems thinking. It’s slower but more sustainable.
But there’s a third way. The most effective way.
It’s to create the future.
This is the ultimate form of leverage. You don’t guess what’s next — you make it what’s next. By building new systems, products, or solutions, you’re literally engineering realities that didn’t exist before.
Welcome to Knowpreneurship — the art and science of creating valuable knowledge that solves problems and generates wealth.
If you want a taste of what’s possible, start with my free course: 6 Days of Unlearning. It’s the systematic mental detox that removes the toxic programming of the industrial age and prepares your mind for what’s coming next.
How Knowpreneurship Actually Works
Let me show you exactly how this operates by tracing the arc of human civilization through the lens of knowledge creation.
In the beginning, humans were just another species competing for resources. What changed everything wasn’t our strength or speed — it was our ability to create and share explanatory knowledge.
Humans are universal explainers. We don’t just react to our environment; we create theories about how reality works and then test them. When we find better explanations, we replace the old ones. This process compounds infinitely.
Think about fire. Some humans didn’t just discover it — they created the first theory about how to make it reliably. That knowledge spread, improved, and became the foundation for metallurgy, cooking, warmth, and eventually the entire industrial revolution.
Every major leap in human wealth and capability follows this pattern:
- Problem Recognition — Someone notices a pattern of suffering or inefficiency
- Explanatory Theory — They develop a framework for understanding why this problem exists
- Practical Solution — They engineer a method to solve the problem systematically
- Knowledge Sharing — The solution spreads and improves through iteration
- Wealth Creation — Value is generated for both the creator and the adopters
The agricultural revolution. The printing press. The internet. Antibiotics. Bitcoin. Each one started with someone creating new explanatory knowledge about how to solve important problems.
Here’s what most people miss: We’re living in the first era where individuals can execute this entire process alone.
You don’t need a university, a corporation, or a government grant. You need a laptop, an internet connection, and the ability to think clearly about problems that matter to people.
The Creator Economy isn’t just about making content — it’s about creating knowledge that transforms how people think, decide, and act. Your audience isn’t buying information; they’re investing in cognitive upgrades.
This is why knowpreneurship is antifragile. It gets stronger every time someone applies it successfully. It requires zero marginal cost of replication.
The Economic Framework for Knowpreneurship
Traditional pricing for knowledge products is broken. Many people just copy what everyone else charges without understanding the underlying logic behind why they do so. A course costs $497 because someone else’s course costs $497. An ebook costs $9.99 because that’s what ebooks cost.
This is economic illiteracy disguised as business strategy.
I’ve developed what I call Rational Expectations for Knowledge Products — a framework that applies rational expectations theory to knowledge pricing.
Here’s the core principle: The present value of any knowledge product is the discounted value of all its future expected returns to the customer.
Not what you think it’s worth. Not what the market will bear. What it will actually generate in measurable value for the person who implements it.
This changes everything.
Suddenly, your knowledge isn’t just information — it’s a calculable investment in someone’s future earning potential, time savings, and outcome optimization.
The Knowledge Value Equation
Here’s how you determine if your knowledge is valuable enough to monetize, using a customized version of Alex Hormozi’s Value Equation:
The Value Equation
( text{Value} ;=; frac{text{Dream Outcome} times text{Perceived Likelihood of Achievement}}{text{Time Delay} times text{Effort and Sacrifice}} )
But for knowledge products, we need to customize it for explanatory knowledge:
(text{Knowledge Value} ;=; frac{text{Problem Solution} times text{Implementation Probability} times text{Explanatory Power}}{text{Learning Time} times text{Cognitive Load} times text{Opportunity Cost}} )
Problem Solution: The bigger and more urgent the problem you solve, the more valuable your knowledge becomes.
“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve” — Elon Musk
Implementation Probability: Your solution must be actionable and achievable by your target audience. Complex theories without practical steps have zero value.
Explanatory Power: Knowledge that explains why something works is infinitely more valuable than knowledge that just describes what to do. You achieve this by explaining things from first principles.
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Learning Time: How long does it take someone to understand and apply your knowledge?
Cognitive Load: How much mental effort is required to implement your solution?
Opportunity Cost: What else could your audience be doing with their time and money?
This equation separates valuable knowledge from expensive ignorance. It’s how you engineer wealth from wisdom.
The Creator Economy: Where Real Value Gets Created
The traditional factory is dead. The new “factory floor” is the Creator Economy — a distributed network of individuals who solve problems, synthesize knowledge, and build leverage systems.
We’re engineering intellectual products that transform how people think, decide, and act. The raw materials aren’t steel and plastic — they’re insights, frameworks, and systematic approaches to universal human challenges.
Your knowledge products aren’t just digital files. They’re weapons against ignorance, tools for cognitive upgrading, and vehicles for personal transformation.
This is why knowledge-based systems are antifragile while traditional assets remain vulnerable. Gold can be confiscated. Real estate can be seized.
But knowledge? Knowledge compounds. Knowledge adapts. Knowledge becomes more valuable the more it’s shared and applied.
The Intelligence Ultimatum
Before you can succeed in the Creator Economy, you need to upgrade the hardware — your intelligence itself.
Most people treat intelligence like it’s fixed. They think they’re either smart or they’re not, and that’s the end of the story. This is Industrial Age programming designed to sort workers into predetermined categories.
The truth is more empowering: intelligence is a system that can be optimized, debugged, and upgraded like any other system.
Most people have never done this basic analysis of their own cognitive system. They wonder why they feel mentally foggy, but they’ve never bothered to identify the variables that control their mental clarity.
This is the beginning of intelligence multiplication — treating your mind like an engineer treats a system that needs optimization.
You have two choices:
Choice A: Continue running Industrial Age mental software while the world upgrades around you. Keep believing that hard work, loyalty, and following instructions will lead to security. Watch others pull ahead with unfair advantages while you wonder what you’re missing.
Choice B: Upgrade your mental operating system to Creator Economy 2.0. Learn to engineer your optimal future instead of hoping for it. Join the small percentage of humans who create value that algorithms cannot replicate.
Most people will read this essay and change nothing. They’ll bookmark it, share it maybe, then return to their regularly scheduled obsolescence.
The ones who act will have an unfair advantage over everyone still playing the old game.
The Great Sorting is happening whether you participate or not.
Choose quickly.
If you want to learn more about increasing your intelligence and getting ready for the future, subscribe to my free newsletter, and you’ll receive my free resource for fixing industrial-age thinking.
Cheers.
See you in another essay:
https://hackernoon.com/ai-army-how-to-outsource-your-business-to-a-fleet-of-digital-robots?embedable=true
https://hackernoon.com/creativity-isnt-a-giftits-a-bank-account-heres-how-to-make-withdrawals?embedable=true
