The good ones know more
The good ones know more.
How do you get to know more? By reading books about advertising. By picking the brains of people who know more than you do. From the Magic Lanterns. And from experience.
I can’t stand callow amateurs who aren’t sufficiently interested in the craft of advertising to assume the posture of students.
— David Ogilvy
They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
In the summer months after graduating college, I was hungry for early career advice. It was then that the algorithm gods delivered to my “Recommended for You” Bill Gurley’s 2019 talk at UT Austin—"Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love.” Ever since then, I’ve returned to this talk more than any other resource when it comes to thinking through my own career.
The entire talk is well worth watching, but the part I found most surprising was Gurley’s assertion that you should strive to know more than anyone else in your field. To my green ears, this sounded either foolish, arrogant, or both.
How could someone early in their career (in my case, fresh out of college) possibly know more than their colleagues who have many more years of experience?
The more closely I studied the careers of people I admired, however, I more I saw the truth in Gurley’s advice.
To start, it’s helpful to disentangle a few words people use interchangeably, but in fact mean different things. Being “knowledgeable,” in the way Gurley refers to, comes from voraciously learning everything you can about your craft. It’s not the same as being “smart,” which is raw intellectual horsepower (or IQ).1
Knowledgeable is also not the same as “wise,” which is an intuition for the right thing to do in different situations: The general who knows whether a battle is won or lost based on the position of his troops. The CEO who pushes hard for a strategic acquisition even if it defies all rational analysis.2
What then, does it mean to be knowledgeable? Quite simply, it’s showing up having done your homework. If you’re in a quantitative field, do you know all your numbers cold? If you’re in a creative field, do you know the relevant prior art? If you’re a chess player, do you recognise the board position when Bobby Fischer sacrificed his rook against Spassky in 1972?
Films capture the difference between these archetypes: In Moneyball (2011), Jonah Hill’s character is knowledgeable (knows the most about baseball stats), but Brad Pitt’s character is wise (uses that information to lead the As to unexpected success). Likewise in Margin Call (2011), the associate is knowledgeable (knows the most about the risks of a mortgage-backed securities blow up), the bank’s CEO is wise (making the difficult call to do a fire sale).
All three are desirable traits. A unicorn would be someone who is smart, wise, and knowledgeable.
Gurley hones in on getting knowledgeable over getting smart or wise because it’s the most actionable, especially early in one’s career: Intelligence is mostly predetermined and out of our control. Wisdom comes with time, which you can’t shortcut. By contrast, knowledge rewards agency—Anyone can decide to be the most knowledgeable and, with sustained effort, predictably achieve it.
Why be the most knowledgeable? To be fair, turning yourself into a subject matter encyclopaedia is but a party trick by itself. Knowledge alone doesn’t make good decisions, nor does it deliver results. It’s valuable insofar as it makes you more useful to others, which in turn opens doors to rooms you otherwise wouldn’t have been in.
As a young legislator, Robert Moses scrupulously studied the art of bill writing. While the average hotshot political upstart made rousing speeches, Moses revelled in the most mundane, yet necessary, tasks. Caro, the Moses biographer, writes:
Bill drafting was called by Albany insiders the “black art of politics.” An expert bill drafter had to know thousands of precedents so that he could call out the one, embodying it in the bill he was working on, that would make the bill legal, or so that he could, by careful wording, avoid bringing the new act within the purview of an old one that might make it illegal. He had to know a myriad of ways of conferring or denying power by written words. He had to know how to lull the opposition by concealing a bill’s real content. For years, everyone had known the identity of the best bill drafter in Albany, Alfred E. Smith. And Smith had never been shy about accepting that accolade. But now, when someone brought up the subject, Smith said, “The best bill drafter I know is Bob Moses.”
Moses’ reputation as the best bill writer in Albany quickly pulled him into the inner orbit of Al Smith, the New York governor at the time, which launched his decades-long political career. Moses would go on to become the “Power Broker”—the man responsible for shaping New York City more than any other.
Becoming the most knowledgeable is also more doable than you’d think. To start, you don’t need to be the single most knowledgeable person in the world. You’ll be an asset to others just from being the most knowledgeable in a network (e.g. company), or sometimes, even if you’re just the most knowledgeable person in the room where it happens.
Do you know the most about golf and the Lakers? Maybe not in the world, but what if you just knew more about these things than the 50 other people who work at your boutique talent agency? Congratulations, Michael Ovitz just handed you the Jack Nicholson account.3
You can narrow down in another sense too—By choosing to be knowledgeable about a more niche subject, or the overlap of several subjects. It’s a tall order to know everything about politics generally, but how about the minutiae of congressional proceedings? No one knows more about that than 20 year-old Kacper Surdy, who learned it by watching C-SPAN, 5,000 miles away from Washington.4
Nowhere is Gurley’s advice more fitting than with new and emerging fields. Because less is known in these areas, you can speedrun your way to the frontiers of knowledge. Quantum mechanics was sneeringly called “Knabenphysik,” German for “boys’ physics,” because its leading experts were so young as the field was gaining steam in the 1920s. The “boys”—Pauli (27), Dirac (25), Heisenberg (25), and Fermi (26)—might’ve taken decades to catch up to the top classical physicists of their day, but they only needed a few years of dedicated study to become the most knowledgeable about this new paradigm.5 How else does one win the Nobel Prize in Physics at 31?
A similar story is playing out in AI today. Corry Wang observed that the most knowledgeable people working on LLMs at Google are about 5 years out of school, with a few reaching “world-class” calibre after only 2 years of industry experience. Karpathy corroborates this point. They must be bright and capable, I’m sure, but first they had to believe it was possible for them to know more than anyone else about this new field.
The punchline to all of this is that while it helps to focus on becoming knowledgeable in an overlooked, new, or otherwise in demand domain, you don’t actually need to for this advice to work well. Even people who choose a broad and competitive arena are surprised to learn just how few of their peers actually “do their homework.” It follows then that if you do your homework and trade time for knowledge, you’ll come out way ahead. Opportunity lurks where diligence has been abdicated.
Gurley’s own career in venture capital is a testament to this principle. He was on the money when he said: “Strive to know more than anyone else in the field. I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s very doable to be the most knowledgeable.”
Being the most knowledgeable is not the only winning path, but it is the most executable strategy for success early on, even if you have to brute force your way to it. Choose something to be the most knowledgeable about, work as hard as you possibly can to get that knowledge, and see what happens.
Thanks to CansaFis, Becky Isjwara, Nick Madrid, Josh Ponelat, and Lee Smart for their feedback on drafts of this essay.
Every once in a while, if you’re swimming in the right waters, you see someone solve a hard, abstract problem so effortlessly you think to yourself: “Damn, this person’s oven just burns hotter than mine!”—that’s smarts.↩
Such a display of mastery depends upon experience compounded over time, so we tend to associate wisdom with age and tenure.↩
From Who Is Michael Ovitz?: “Yet our MO was to be attentive, polite, and well informed. I wanted worldliness to be one of a CAA agent’s defining qualities—Be able to talk knowledgeably about what your clients love. This will encompass pretty much everything. I insisted that our agents have a reading list: one national newspaper, one international newsmagazine, and one special-interest magazine, such as Golf Digest. I had two hundred magazine subscriptions, and I’d skim the magazines as I was on the phone, everything from Redbook to Road & Track. I got a lot of flak about all this homework, but I remember feeling vindicated when Mike Menchel, a twenty-six-year-old agent, came with me to Aspen for the opening of a play Robin Williams was in. Mike walked up to Jack Nicholson and offered him a light, then chatted with him about golf and the Lakers—two of Jack’s favorite topics.”↩
POLITICO: The Mystery Social Media Account Schooling Congress on How to Do Its Job↩
Their ages at the 1927 Solvay Conference↩