Tuesday Email: The Half-Life of What You Know

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

The thing that we tend to pride ourselves on, deep expertise, is actually maybe our fastest decaying asset.

That's a hard thing to say, and it might be even harder to hear. But it's true, and there's science behind it.

Here's what I mean. Expertise isn't a compounding asset by default. It only compounds if you continuously reinforce it, continuously train and evolve it. Because what happens is, information becomes stale. The way we do things becomes stale. I mean, this happens to me constantly. The way I used to manage individual client relationships 15 years ago is different from how I should be doing it today. But because it got so ingrained, because it was working, I never went back and retrained it. And so it's still there. Still my default. Even when it shouldn't be.

That's the trap. And it's not just about forgetting things. It's about holding onto things that have quietly gone out of date.

Technical Knowledge Is a Liability Unless You Maintain It

There's a concept called the half-life of knowledge. Not just a metaphor, an actual mathematical decay curve. If you learn something and don't use it, you lose it. And if you don't reinforce it or evolve it over time, whatever you do know starts to go stale even while you're actively using it.

The research behind this is called scientometrics, the quantitative study of how scientific literature grows and changes over time. And what it shows is that scientific literature has grown at about 4.7% annually since the 17th century, doubling approximately every 15 years. Scientific knowledge expands tenfold every 50 years, meaning that half of what is presented as absolute fact at any given moment will be proven obsolete or incorrect within half a century.

That's a staggering number when you sit with it.

I've been in this industry almost 20 years now. In that span alone, the body of knowledge in wealth management has effectively doubled. There are people in this industry who've been doing it 30, 45 years. Half of what they know may have already changed.

And if you don't allow yourself to unlearn what you knew and relearn what is now new, you're going to be stale.

To bring this closer to home: a study from the CFA Institute applied a mathematical formula to quantify how many hours an advisor would need to spend studying each week just to stay current with applied portfolio management and market research. The answer is 19 hours per week. Not to get ahead — just to maintain.

Nobody has that kind of time. And so I think that should tell us something. There is no advisor who can maintain a full technical knowledge base manually anymore. The math just doesn't work.

The Two Types of Knowledge and Why It Matters

There are two different types of knowledge, and they don't decay the same way.

Declarative memory is knowing that. Knowing the tax laws, the IRA limits, the formulas, the rules. The explicit, easily verbalized stuff.

Procedural memory is knowing how. This is the system that governs physical and cognitive skills, habits, behavioral techniques, the execution of strategies. It's more subconscious. You don't explain it, you express it through action and performance.

Now here's the thing. AI and Google, even before AI, helped with declarative memory. Knowing what the capital of a state is, knowing what the IRA limits are. You don't need to have those memorized. You can look them up. And I think some people believe that's what makes them valuable. But declarative knowledge, knowing that, is not what makes people valuable. It's the knowing how that creates value.

Yet we keep spending our time and energy on remembering and knowing that information. And in doing so, we forget to invest in the knowing how information. Which is the thing that actually matters.

There's also an important distinction in how these two types of knowledge decay. Research on procedural skills shows that immediately following initial training, there is virtually zero decay. Makes sense, right? You just learned it. But after one year or more of not using it, procedural proficiency drops significantly — nearly one and a half standard deviation units. You go from retaining everything to retaining about 60%.

So what happens when you need to perform at 100% but you only remember 60%? You make up the other 40%. Based on context, based on what you do know, you fill in the gaps.

That's called a hallucination when AI does it. And we say that's why AI is bad. But our minds have been doing that for hundreds of years. We just accept it because that's how it's always been.

The difference is, our expertise has ego attached to it. We think we know how it goes. We've been doing it for 15 years. And so we don't check. We just fill in the gaps without realizing we're doing it.

We Have to Learn to Unlearn

Here's the other side of this that doesn't get talked about enough: unlearning is as important as learning.

If we don't make space for new information, what we do becomes antiquated. Legacy processes fossilize inside our brains, inside our firms, and they block adaptation. So we need a formal way to unlearn.

There are different types of unlearning. There's routine unlearning — a gradual, passive fading that happens naturally with non-use. There's directed unlearning — intentional removal of specific workflows, like a software migration, where you're forcing the change. And there's deep unlearning — the highly disruptive kind that gets triggered by a significant failure. The kind where what you were doing caused something bad, and you're done with it immediately.

What's really interesting to me is the routine unlearning. Because here's the problem with it: even though the process is slow and carries minimal friction, if you're not intentional about it, you will revert to your default. Life comes up, things get busy, and you go right back to how you always did it.

I think about this a lot with my golf game. I've been working on getting rid of some tendencies, trying to make my swing more consistent. And when I'm focused on it at the range, I can make progress. But then I'm in a match, I'm under pressure, I'm tired, and my defaults come right back. Because they've been ingrained for 20-plus years.

That's what happens in business too. If we don't create routines that force us into the new way, we'll always revert to the old one. The key is that when you're unlearning something, you have to build the new process alongside it, something that makes it hard to go back to the default. It's harder in the short term. But if you believe it's going to be better, you commit to the intentional difficulty.

The Atul Gawande Story

There's a surgeon named Atul Gawande who, eight years into practice and after performing over 2,000 surgeries, found that his performance had plateaued. More experience, more surgeries, but no improvement.

You'd think the answer would be more training. But what he did instead was hire an outside observer to watch him operate. Someone just to provide a second perspective. And what that outside observer found were things Gawande couldn't see himself, micro-habits. His light angle. His elbow position. Moments of procedural hesitation. Things so ingrained and automatic that he had no awareness of them.

And by identifying those things, he was able to improve.

To me, this is the same pattern. The same ingraining of knowledge and habit that makes it hard to overcome without an outside sounding board, without someone to hold you accountable.

Think about what this looks like for advisors. How you run meetings. Having a peer sit in and provide feedback. Not a junior person who might feel uncomfortable speaking up — a peer, someone at your same level, with psychological safety on both sides. Both advisors learn. The one observing picks up new skills. The one being observed gets real feedback.

The challenge is that when you've been successful, the last thing you want is someone suggesting you do it differently. You can get ego around how you do things. But someone pointing something out isn't a knock on you. It's just an opportunity to find the next curve up. And that's how growth actually works.

What To Do With This

None of this is theoretical. We have a decision to make.

We can brute-force our way through it, try to keep up with 19 hours a week of declarative knowledge maintenance, stay current on every portfolio management update, and memorize every changing tax rule. That's one path.

Or we can surrender some of that. Leverage the tools that now exist — AI, research platforms, planning software — to handle the declarative recall. And redirect that time and attention toward something more durable. The knowing how. How to use the information. How to apply it. How to build relationships and deepen them. How to actually help people navigate the hard stuff.

The advisors who use AI for declarative recall and redirect toward procedural mastery are the ones who pull ahead. That's the data. That's the science.

Here's where I've landed personally. I'm not going to try to overhaul everything at once. I want to unlearn one thing and relearn it. For me, it's how I run client meetings. I want to unlearn the habit of going in without a pre-meeting agenda and leaving without a meaningful follow-up. That's one thing. Just one. But if I do it with intention, with a process that makes it hard to revert, it changes.

That's how this starts. List out all the things you've been doing the same way since you began. Not exactly the same, but similarly. Then pick one. Just one. Identify it, and say: this is the one I'm going to unlearn and relearn.

The Honest Truth About This Industry

I don't think this industry is behind on knowledge. I think it's full of bright, motivated, smart people who genuinely serve their clients well. But I do think the industry struggles with throwing out information and knowledge and relearning it.

We get so committed to what we've known and how we've done it, because it's been successful, that we get stuck in our ways. Because we are a risk-averse industry. And that risk-aversion keeps us from trying new things, from learning something different, because we're so afraid of the downside. Losing a client. Slowing our growth. Making a mistake.

But what if the upside really is great? We know what the downside looks like. We don't know what the upside looks like yet. And maybe that uncertainty isn't a reason to stay still, maybe it's just a reason to start small.

The Futureproof Advisor isn't perfect at any of this. But they're constantly working to get better at it. They learn something, add it to their stack. Learn something else, add that too. And that stack just keeps getting bigger over time. You can't speed that up. It comes with time, with depth, with intentionality.

You just have to commit to it long term.

The best is ahead!

-Matt