Why you should give away your knowledge for free

For years, knowledge was power. Now the Internet has made knowledge cheap. You can barely click a mouse button without bumping into some knowledge.

If you are an expert in your field, the best thing you can do is give away your knowledge for free.

But why isn't this selling yourself short? Because the thing that you're not giving away (and nobody can easily copy) is your experience in applying that knowledge to your customer's needs, and your time to actually help them with their problems.

Seth Godin writes:

I don't know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas, the faster and more insightfully, the better.

Knowledge is cheap. It's what you can do with it that counts.

Comments

[Geoff]

Einstein did say that imagination is more important than knowledge. But you need a certain amount of knowledge in order to start to use your imagination.

[Alistair Birch]

Interestingly, this reminded me about something I'd read about ancient Jewish culture, where sages often delineated between knowledge and wisdom - the latter being knowledge applied to the practical business of living life - and thus was valued more highly.

[zenbullets]

you're talking about agalmics: http://zenbullets.com/blog/?p=123, post-scarcity economics.

[Danny Hope]

Similar sentiments: http://yandleblog.com/2007/10/keeping-things-public.html