Howdy Modern Authors!

I'm going to make a slightly uncomfortable (and dare I say unusual) observation.

I think we have an expert problem.

Not a shortage of experts.

Quite the opposite.

We have more people explaining things than at any point in human history.

Experts explaining leadership.
Experts explaining productivity.
Experts explaining relationships.
Experts explaining entrepreneurship.
Experts explaining how to become an expert.

And now, thanks to AI, we can manufacture an almost unlimited amount of expert-sounding content in approximately twelve seconds.

Wonderful.

Just what the internet needed.

Another 47-point guide to becoming a better leader.

But here's what I've been thinking about lately.

The world doesn't need more people who can explain what they know.

It needs more people who can explain what they're seeing.

There's a difference.
A really big one.

And I think understanding that difference is one of the most important things a Modern Author can do.

If you find yourself feeling like your 'lived experience' could easily be more beneficial than many of today's loud and proud experts, then I think you'll appreciate this post.

I Learned This the Hard Way Writing Super Mentors

When I started working on Super Mentors, I had what I thought was a pretty good problem.

I had too much material.

Interviews.
Research.
Stories.
Experiences.
Conversations with remarkable people.
Years of thinking about mentorship.

I had plenty of useful things to say.

In fact, that was the problem.

Everything seemed useful.

One interview would reveal something fascinating about how a mentor changed someone's career.
Another would uncover a completely different lesson.
Someone would share an extraordinary story.
I'd discover another interesting piece of research.

And naturally, I'd think:

Oh, that's going in the book.

Then I'd find something else.

That's going in too.

Before long, I had a growing collection of genuinely interesting material. And I told my editor:

"I think this probably needs to be a six book series about Mentorship for Entrepreneurs, one for Young Adults, one for leaders..."

She cut me off. "Write one great book. Then you have permission to do the next one."

I was stunned. I had all this great information. She encouraged me to read my content which was getting close to 80,000 words.

There was a ton of stuff....
And a book that wasn't getting much clearer.

Because I was making a mistake that I now see authors make constantly.

I was confusing collecting information with developing an idea.

Those are not the same thing.

And eventually I had to ask myself a different question.

Not:

What else should I include?

But:

What keeps showing up?

Across all these interviews...
Across all these stories...
Across all these experiences...

What was repeating?
What were people doing that they didn't even realize they were doing?
What explained why certain mentoring relationships seemed to change lives while others never really went anywhere?

That was the interesting work.

Not collecting another story.

Finding the pattern hiding inside the stories.

And once I started looking for patterns instead of simply collecting insights, the book became a different kind of project.

I wasn't just documenting what people had experienced.

I was trying to understand what those experiences revealed.

That's a much more valuable ambition.

Most Experts Are Really Good at Collecting Dots

Last week, I spoke to a super bright, really sharp woman. She had turned 40 and decided she was smarter than her boss and needed a way to stop working for him (which, by the way, was the best opener I'd had to "why do you want to write a book").

"I feel like I probably need more stuff first," she said. "Why would anyone listen to me?"

"You don't need more stuff," I said. "You need something worth listening to. It's not how many stories, clients, examples, or anecdotes. It's often someone who is more observant and curious who sees what others are missing. That's why they listen."

(And hopefully why she can use her book to stop working for her boss.)

Her story isn't uncommon. In fact, here's something I've noticed after working with thousands of authors.

Experts tend to be extraordinarily good at accumulating information. And they measure themselves by it...

It's practically an occupational hazard.

We read.
We research.
We attend conferences.
We listen to podcasts.
We collect examples.
We save articles.
We interview interesting people.
We gather stories.
We build enormous folders of things we might someday use.

And if you're anything like me, you probably have an embarrassing number of notes somewhere that seemed absolutely brilliant when you saved them.

But collecting dots isn't the same as connecting them.

And I think that's where a lot of experts get stuck.

They have an enormous amount of knowledge.

But they haven't yet figured out what it all means.

So they keep sharing information.

Another useful tip.
Another interesting story.
Another insightful observation.
Another LinkedIn post.

People respond:

"That's helpful!"

Great.

But six months later?

Nobody remembers it.

Because helpful information is easy to consume.

One of the most common things ambitious authors tell me is how many words they've written.

And sadly, I have to tell them that we need to figure out which of them are truly useful. Which is actually what great authorship does.

It's much harder to remember information that doesn't connect to a larger idea.

And that distinction is becoming increasingly important.

AI Just Made Information a Terrible Competitive Advantage

Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

For a long time, having access to information was valuable.

Then the internet made information easier to find.
Then social media made information easier to distribute.
And now AI makes information easier to explain, organize, summarize, and remix.

Which means something pretty fundamental has changed.

Knowing a lot of things is becoming a less distinctive advantage.

I'm not saying expertise doesn't matter.

Quite the opposite.

But if your entire value proposition is:

"I know a lot about leadership."

Well...

So does ChatGPT.

If your advantage is:

"I can explain complicated ideas clearly."

That's wonderful.

AI is getting pretty good at that too.

If your entire intellectual contribution is:

"Here are seven lessons I've learned about entrepreneurship."

Congratulations.

You are competing with approximately infinity.

But there's something much more interesting that experienced people can bring to the table.

Pattern recognition.

The ability to look across hundreds of experiences and see something that other people miss.

The ability to notice what repeats.

What matters.
What doesn't.
What predicts success.
What explains failure.
What everyone else is misunderstanding.

That's the kind of expertise I want to read.

And increasingly, I think it's the kind of expertise that will become most valuable.

Information Tells You What Happened. Patterns Help You See What's Happening.

Here's how I think about the distinction.

Information tells us what happened.

A company lost its best employees.
A founder struggled to scale.
A leadership team couldn't make decisions.
A mentoring program failed to produce results.

Useful observations.

Insight helps explain why.

Maybe employees weren't leaving because of compensation.
Maybe the founder wasn't struggling with delegation.
Maybe the leadership team didn't actually have a communication problem.
Maybe the mentoring program wasn't failing because people lacked motivation.

Now we're getting somewhere.

But there's another level.

Patterns help us recognize what might happen next.

If you can identify the underlying conditions that repeatedly produce an outcome, you can start helping people recognize those conditions in their own lives.

That's when expertise becomes incredibly useful.

Because now you're not simply telling someone what happened to somebody else.

You're helping them understand what's happening to them.

And perhaps even what to do about it.

That's the difference between information and intellectual capital.

Information gets consumed.

A useful pattern gets applied.

The Best Authors Help You Recognize Something

Think about the books that have really stayed with you.

Not necessarily your favorites.

The ones that changed how you see something.

James Clear didn't invent habits.
But he helped millions of people recognize how small behaviors compound.

Simon Sinek didn't invent purpose.
But he gave people a simple way to recognize the difference between what organizations do and why they do it.

Clayton Christensen didn't invent innovation.
But his work helped people recognize patterns in how established businesses can be disrupted.

That's what makes these ideas powerful.

They don't merely provide information.

They give people a new lens.

Once you understand the lens, you start seeing the pattern everywhere.

You hear someone explaining a problem and think:

"Ohhhh. That's exactly what's happening here."

You sit in a meeting and suddenly recognize something you couldn't articulate before.

You see a decision differently.

You notice a problem earlier.

You explain something to a colleague using language you borrowed from a book.

That's intellectual word of mouth.

The idea becomes useful enough that someone carries it into another conversation.

And that's when an author's thinking starts traveling without them.

But Here's the Hard Part: You Have to Take a Position

This is where writing a serious book gets uncomfortable.

Because recognizing patterns requires something many experts have spent their entire careers avoiding.

Interpretation.

You have to decide what the evidence means.
You have to decide which examples matter.
You have to decide what doesn't belong.
You have to decide what connects the stories.

And perhaps most importantly...

You have to be willing to be wrong.

That's a big deal.

Because it's relatively safe to share information.

"Here are ten interesting things I've learned about leadership."

Nobody's particularly upset by that.

But when you say:

"After twenty years of working with leadership teams, I've become convinced that most organizations are solving the wrong problem..."

Now you've got something.

An actual point of view.
A thesis.
A claim someone can test.
Something people might disagree with.

And that's where many aspiring authors get nervous.

They start hedging.
Adding caveats.
Including every possible exception.
Trying to make the argument so comprehensive that nobody could possibly disagree.

But in the process, they often make it so broad that nobody can remember it.

If your book tries to explain everything, it may end up being known for nothing.

You have to make choices.

That's the work.

Great Books Are Built Through Subtraction

This is one of the strangest things about writing.

We assume the book gets better when we add more.

More research.
More stories.
More examples.
More frameworks.
More supporting evidence.

Sometimes.

But eventually, adding more can make the book worse.

Because every additional idea competes for attention.
Every extra framework asks the reader to remember something else.
Every interesting tangent pulls the reader away from the central argument.

And eventually the book becomes a museum of everything the author knows.

Interesting exhibits everywhere.

No clear reason to visit.

I've come to believe that one of the most important skills in nonfiction authorship is knowing what to leave out.

Not because the material isn't valuable.

Because it doesn't serve the pattern you're trying to explain.

Clarity is often the result of deciding what doesn't belong.

And that's hard for experts.

We love our ideas.
We love our research.
We love the story that took us six months to uncover.

But sometimes the most important editorial decision is saying:

"That's fascinating. And it doesn't belong in this book."

That's not losing intellectual capital.

It's concentrating it.

Your Book Should Give People a Lens, Not a Library

This is probably the simplest way I can explain what I'm getting at.

A library contains information.
A lens changes what you see.

Both are valuable.

But they serve very different purposes.

If I finish your book knowing fifty interesting things I didn't know before...

That's nice.

If I finish your book and suddenly recognize a pattern in my business, my career, my relationships, or my life that I couldn't see before...

That's transformational.

And it's far more likely I'll remember it.

Recommend it.
Talk about it.
Use it.

That's what I want Modern Authors to build.

Not simply books filled with useful information.

Books that make the world easier to understand.

Here's the Exercise I'd Give Every Aspiring Author

If you're working on a book right now, I want you to try something.

Put the outline aside for a moment.
Forget the chapter titles.
Forget how many words you've written.
Forget whether you've collected enough research.

And ask yourself three questions.

1. What do I keep seeing?

Think across your experiences.

Your clients.
Your students.
Your colleagues.
Your research.
Your own successes and failures.

What keeps happening?

What pattern has appeared so many times that you almost take it for granted?

Sometimes your most valuable insight is something you've stopped noticing because it feels obvious to you.

2. What do most people misunderstand about it?

This is where things get interesting.

Because identifying a pattern is only the beginning.

What do people consistently get wrong?
What explanation do they accept that doesn't match what you've experienced?
What conventional wisdom have you quietly stopped believing?
Where are people treating a symptom instead of understanding the underlying problem?

That's often where your book's central argument is hiding.

3. What becomes possible once someone recognizes the pattern?

This is the big one.

What changes for the reader?
Can they make a better decision?
Avoid a predictable mistake?
Recognize an opportunity earlier?
Understand why something keeps happening?
Help someone else see it too?

Because recognizing a pattern is only valuable if that recognition changes something.

The best intellectual property doesn't just make people smarter. It makes them more capable.

That's the bar.

In my own life, I've learned the best way I can write better content is to stop writing.
And start teaching.

For you perhaps it's giving a talk, designing a lecture, building a powerpoint, drafting an article series.
Take a step back and stop with more content, and start with teaching.

This Is How Expertise Becomes Intellectual Capital

I use the phrase intellectual capital a lot.

And I think it's worth explaining why.

Expertise lives inside you.

It's the accumulation of everything you've learned.

Your experiences.
Your observations.
Your judgment.
Your knowledge.

But when you identify a meaningful pattern...
Give it language...
Organize it into a framework...
And teach other people how to recognize and apply it...

Something changes.

Your expertise becomes portable.

Other people can use it without you standing in the room.

They can teach it.
Reference it.
Apply it.
Share it.
Build on it.

And every time they do, your thinking has the opportunity to create value beyond the original interaction.

That's why I think books can be such extraordinary assets.

Not because 50,000 words are inherently valuable.

They're not.

AI can produce 50,000 words.

But 50,000 words organized around a genuinely useful way of understanding the world?

That's something different.

That's a body of thinking.

And if it's good enough, it can become the foundation for everything else you build.

A keynote.
A workshop.
A consulting methodology.
An assessment.
A course.
A community.
A company.

The formats change.

The underlying pattern keeps creating value.

That's intellectual capital.

So Stop Collecting. Start Connecting.

Here's what I'd leave you with.

Most aspiring authors think their problem is that they don't have enough material.

So they keep gathering.

Another interview.
Another article.
Another book.
Another example.
Another interesting idea.

But if you've spent ten or twenty years doing meaningful work...

I suspect you already have more than enough material.

What you may not have done yet is identify the pattern connecting it.

And that requires a different kind of work.

Less collecting.
More interpreting.

Less explaining everything you know.
More deciding what you actually believe.

Less asking:

"What else should I include?"

More asking:

"What am I seeing that other people are missing?"

Because the world doesn't need another book that simply summarizes what we already know.

It needs books that help us see what we haven't yet understood.

And maybe that's the most important distinction of all.

Experts know things.
Modern Authors help us see things.

Happy writing, my friends.

And here's to finding the patterns worth sharing.

Eric