Stop Searching for the Thing Nobody Else Knows

Here is the mistake, and it has probably cost you a year.

You have been searching your memory for the unique thing. The piece of knowledge nobody else in your profession has. You run the search every few months, you find nothing that survives the test, and you conclude — reasonably — that you have nothing to teach.

The search fails because the thing you are looking for does not exist. In professional education almost nothing is unique. Your field has schools, journals, conferences and thirty years of people writing things down. If you found genuinely unique knowledge, the more likely explanation is that you had not looked hard enough.

So stop testing for rarity. Ask a better question instead.

What kind of knowledge is it?

Not is this unique but what category does this belong to, because the categories behave completely differently in a market.

Take one thing you know well and run it through these.

Facts. What is true about the subject. Definitions, values, mechanisms, the content of the standard reference. This is free, universally available, and reproducible on demand by anyone who can type the question. It is worth nothing on its own, and a course made entirely of it is what people mean when they say online education is a race to the bottom.

Procedure. How the thing is actually done, step by step. Sometimes documented, often half- documented — the manual describes the intended process and the real one has three additional steps everybody knows about. Worth something. Not much on its own.

Sequence. What order to do things in, and what you can safely defer. This is almost never written down anywhere, because education is organized by topic and work is organized by sequence. Schools teach you the parts; nobody teaches you the order. Genuinely scarce.

Judgment. Which approach applies to this situation, how to tell, and when to stop. Also undocumented, for the ordinary reason that the people who have it acquired it by doing the work rather than by reading about it.

Failure. What goes wrong, why it goes wrong, what it looks like early, and what you do when it has already happened. This is the scarcest category by a distance, and nobody counts it as knowledge.

Why the last one is the answer

Look at what makes failure knowledge different.

It cannot be obtained by study. It cannot be inferred from the correct procedure, because knowing the right way to do something tells you very little about the ways it collapses. It is not in any textbook, because textbooks describe intended outcomes. And it is expensive to acquire, since the only route in is to have been there when it happened.

It is also the part of your experience you are least likely to volunteer. Nobody lists it. It is not on your resume, you do not mention it in interviews, and if a colleague asked what you were expert in you would name something from the first two categories.

Meanwhile it is precisely what somebody four years behind you is desperate for and cannot buy.

The test that replaces "unique"

Rarity was the wrong test. Here is the right one.

Can the person who needs this actually get it?

Not: does it exist somewhere. Everything exists somewhere. Can a specific person, with a specific problem, at a specific moment, obtain it in a usable form in the time they have?

Usually the answer is no, and for boring reasons. It is scattered across nine sources. It is written for a different context. It exists but is buried inside a two-year qualification. It is known by people who have no incentive to explain it. Or it is simply held in the heads of experienced practitioners who have never been asked.

That is your opening, and being the only one who knows was never part of it.

What raises the price

One more thing worth knowing, because it changes what you should pick.

Professionals do not only buy solutions. They buy the feeling of holding something most of their colleagues do not — a skill that looks difficult from outside, a capability that reads as advanced. The more unattainable your subject appears to the average person in your field, the more it is worth, and this is true even when the thing itself turns out to be learnable in an afternoon once somebody explains it properly.

So between two candidates, prefer the one that looks hard. Not the one that is hardest to explain — the one that looks hard from where your buyer is standing.

And notice that this is completely compatible with the point above. The most valuable thing you can sell is frequently a subject with a fearsome reputation and a straightforward answer, held by a small number of people who worked it out the expensive way.

You are one of them. You have simply been filing it under "things that went wrong" rather than "things I know."