Tuesday Email: You’re Not Behind. You’re Just Not Starting. (Wednesday send)

Happy Wednesday!

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

The moment happened in a partners meeting just a few months back.

It was years into my focus on reading and gaining new insights to be more thoughtful.

I felt I was making progress.

Until I was put on the spot.

One of my partners asked me about a topic I recently read about a few books ago.

I felt confident, until I spoke. I ended up saying words. But I was unable to articulate it how I remembered reading it.

That moment bothered me for days.

And then it taught me something I think a lot of us are experiencing but not saying out loud.

We've confused consuming knowledge with learning it.

They are not the same thing.

When we are researching and learning, it feels amazing. Our brain literally rewards us for it. Gathering information triggers the same dopamine pathways as actually doing something.

We feel sharper. More prepared. More capable.

That feeling is a trap.

Because most of the time, we're not researching to get smarter. We're researching to avoid making a decision.

Think about how this may show up in practice.

You're evaluating a new CRM. You start with three or four requirements that actually matter. But then the fear kicks in. What if there's a better option we haven't seen? So you expand. More demos. A bigger comparison matrix. Features you don't even need.

Six months later, you're still "evaluating."

Jeff Bezos coined a framework for how to think about this.

He separates decisions into two types: Type 1 decisions are one-way doors — irreversible, high-stakes, deserving of real deliberation. Type 2 decisions are two-way doors — if you're wrong, you walk back through and try again.

The challenge is that given the industry we are in and the expectations of our service, we tend to treat almost every decision like a Type 1.

A $200/month software subscription? We agonize over it like it's a permanent amendment to the firm's DNA. When the reality is, most of what we're endlessly deliberating is completely reversible.

Even a 60% better solution is infinitely better than the 0% solution you're running while you're still deciding.

Because we are human, we tend to fall prey to this psychological concept known as the illusion of competence.

When you read something and understand it in the moment, your brain tells you you've mastered it. You haven't. You've built pathways for recognition*,* you'd know the concept if you saw it again. But you can't pull it out when it counts.

That's what happened to me in that meeting.

It's also what happens at every industry conference. We spend an hour in a keynote, take great notes and are ready to implement what we here.

We “get it” and know how to act on it.

And then we don’t.

Two weeks later, our notes are sitting in a folder or stashed under client reports. We forget why we were energized. And nothing changes.

Research on the concept of the “Forgetting Curve” tells us we've actually lost up to 90% of what you heard just 2 weeks after learning it.

The data is blunt about this. Retention of information hinges on active usage of the information, not passive consumption.

When we read, we retain about 10% of what we read. Sitting in lectures, we retain about 5%. Watching a tutorial we retain about 30%. But if take what we read and do something ourselves with it? We retain about 75%. And then if we teach what we have learned to someone else, we retain nearly 90%.

That gap isn't small. It's enormous.

And here is where I have to come clean.

I talk about AI constantly.

I'm building with it.

I believe in it deeply.

And I think AI might be the most dangerous amplifier of this problem that's ever existed.

AI is intellectual procrastination at scale.

You can now generate infinite research in minutes. Ask an LLM to analyze direct indexing from every angle and you'll get something beautiful — organized, thorough, sophisticated.

AI makes us feel like we are the energizer bunny of productivity!

But what's actually happening is that the AI is doing all the thinking, and we're the spectator.

Passive consumption that is being perceived as actual work.

I've fallen into this trap many of times. I'll spend hours in conversations with AI, walking away feeling like I had a complete grasp on something, and then realize I hadn't actually done anything. I hadn't moved. Hadn't tested. Hadn't applied. I'd just consumed a really impressive summary.

The challenge we face with the illusion of competence doesn’t disappear when we have better tools. Rather, it gets magnified.

The fix isn't to stop using AI. The fix is to flip how you use it.

Stop using it as an input engine for more research.

Start using it as an output engine for execution. Instead of "tell me best practices for client onboarding" — try "draft me a welcome email, an ops checklist, and a first-review meeting agenda."

Use AI to compress the research phase. Not extend it.

Let’s look at some real numbers. Because this isn't just a psychological problem, there is a financial component to it.

Take an RIA with $500M AUM. Their legacy CRM creates about 10 hours of operational drag per week per lead advisor and they have three advisors. That's 30 hours of operational drag a week.

If we could eliminate that drag and have those hours focused on prospecting, what could happen? Maybe 2 new prospects per week? And is we assume a 25% close rate with an average client size of $1M at 1% fee, then we are missing out on roughly $5,000 in new recurring revenue every week we delay this decision. That’s $260,000 per year that we are losing on our top line. Gone. Not from a bad decision.

From no decision at all.

And the cost doesn't stay flat. It compounds. A firm that waits three years to address tech or operational decisions doesn't face a linear climb — it faces a geometric one. Data gets messier. Staff entrenches in workarounds. The gap between your capabilities and your clients' expectations keeps widening.

We all tell ourselves our future selves will have more time and more clarity.

That's a lie we tell ourselves. Our future selves inherit the debt our present selves are creating.

I'm not saying stop reading. Stop learning. Stop researching.

What I'm saying is: there has to be a stopping point.

There's a concept I love called Minimum Viable Knowledge. Same idea as an MVP in tech — get directionally sound, then move.

You don't need to be the expert. You need to know enough to start.

Take crypto as an example. You don't need six months of blockchain whitepapers to have a productive conversation with a client asking about it.

You need to know the three most common questions they'll ask, your firm's compliance stance, and one or two approved vehicles. That's four hours of prep, not four months. Then go have the conversation. Learn from the questions they actually ask. Let that refine your next one.

Until you have skin in the game, you won't make the sacrifices necessary to make things work.

That's not a motivational statement. It's just how learning works.

After that partner meeting, I changed my process.

Now when I finish a book, I do one of two things. I either build a four-slide deck teaching the three biggest takeaways. Or I take the most interesting idea and I find someone to share it with — I talk it out, watch how it lands, see where people lean in and where their eyes glaze over.

It takes more time than just closing the book and starting the next one. But it changed everything.

Because I stopped being someone who reads about ideas and started becoming someone who uses them.

We tell our clients to think about dividends, not price movement. To invest now and let compounding do the work. And yet when it comes to our own firms — our own learning, our own growth — we refuse to make the investment. We keep researching. We keep reading. We keep attending.

And we keep waiting.

The most expensive tuition in this industry isn't paid to a consultant or conference organizer.

It's paid to the market, in the form of the growth you forfeited while you were busy getting ready.

Pick one thing you've been "researching."

And stop researching it today.

Instead set up a small test. And see what you can learn by doing, by acting.

Ultimately, that's where the real knowledge lives.

The best is ahead!

-Matt