The longer I am in this business, the more I realize that for tomorrow’s writer, knowledge doesn’t matter. Yes, that’s right, KNOWLEDGE WON’T MATTER FOR FUTURE SUCCESS. At least, not at first.
Not even relationships will matter. Or your writing skills.
The most important skill tomorrow’s writer will need to master is how to become less confused than their peers.
Reason #1: Knowledge is available at the click of a button. It’s almost always surface-level and noise. Thus, in order to proceed to deeper levels of learning, an author will have to learn what surface level is and then understand what the next level looks like. That’s nearly impossible unless you find the right influencers, which takes time.
Reason #2: You can’t trust what you see. Our time will be defined by how distorted our reality is with social media and the Internet. How do you know if what you’re reading is real or fake? Would you take writing advice from an AI? What if you’re doing it already and don’t know? What if that AI is biased against indies?
Reason #3: It’s difficult to read people (and companies) and their intentions over the Internet. For this reason it’s hard for writers to market to new readers and hard for readers to trust new authors. The only way to win is to be very charismatic, or be a really good writer, or…win by advertising (manipulating) to convince people that you are one of the former. Ideology means almost nothing anymore—not sure that it ever has in the writing community.
Therefore, minimize your confusion and learn to see things for what they are. Only then can you accumulate knowledge that will help you be successful. It’s easy today, but it will be harder in the future.
It’s like wiping frost from a window. Once you wipe, you can see better. The window of the future looks very frosty.
There’s no such thing as the wisdom of the crowd on the Internet. Most people will enjoy being ignorant and will want you to be, too. It’s like that today, but it’s going to be much, much worse. That’s because they’ll be confused. They won’t know what reality is. Worse, everyone will have their own “custom reality”, which is flat out dangerous.
Therefore, be less confused than other people, in all areas of your life. That will make all the difference.
