There’s a question that stops most people before they ever try to package anything they know. It usually shows up in two parts, even though it feels like one doubt.
The first part: why would anyone pay to listen to me?
The second, quieter part: and even if they would — I’m not saying anything special. If I know it, surely everyone else knows it too.
I’ve heard versions of both more times than I can count. Here’s why neither one is true, and why what you know is a valuable resource, whether you believe it or not at the moment.
The first doubt: “why would anyone pay me?”
This one isn’t really about your knowledge at all. It’s about whether you feel you’ve earned the right to charge for it.
Here’s my answer to that, and it isn’t a theory: I’ve been selling my packaged knowledge for years. Real people have paid real money for information I already had in my head before I ever wrote a word of it down. Yes, it was a surprise to me too, but it’s what happened. And if it worked for me, with my subject, the mechanism isn’t unique to my knowledge — it’s just understanding who wants the information, and packaging it so they can find it.
Here’s the specific moment it first happened, because it still surprises me when I think about it.
In the late 1980s I was working full-time as a commercial surveyor and, if I’m being honest, I was lonely. I hadn’t met my wife yet, and I was wondering how I could meet people. Heart on sleeve, I know, but it’s relevant. Around that time a leaflet came through the door advertising night school courses at the local college, and one that jumped out was “Creative Writing for Magazines.” I thought, why not — sounds fun, and maybe there’ll be someone nice there to meet.
Spoiler alert: the future Mrs J wasn’t there. But the one thing the course taught me was that the world is hungry for content, and that it might be fun to see if I could get something published.
Now, at that time I hadn’t bought a single residential investment property in my life. But I wrote an article about investing in residential property anyway, because I knew a bit about it and figured it’s one of those topics people are always interested in. I sent it to a magazine called Making Money and asked if they’d like to use it. They said yes, and paid me around £75 for it — not a fortune, but a nice sum in the late 1980s, especially as I felt I hadn’t really done a lot to “earn” it. That was the first proof I ever had that someone would pay for what was in my head, and I didn’t have a track record to point to yet. I just got over my doubts, followed the process, and it worked.
The second doubt: “surely everyone else already knows this too?”
This is the more interesting one, because it feels true even when it’s completely wrong.
When you’ve done something for ten, twenty or thirty years, your knowledge stops feeling like expertise and starts feeling like common sense — not because it stopped being valuable, but because it’s been living in your head so long you’ve lost the ability to see it as anything other than obvious.
Psychologists have a name for this: the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it’s almost impossible to imagine not knowing it, which makes it very easy to assume everyone else must know it too.
Here’s a mundane example, the kind that’s easy to miss precisely because it feels too obvious to be worth mentioning. After decades as a chartered surveyor, spotting a defect in a building is automatic to me — I don’t consciously look for it any more, I just see it. But most people who want to buy a property have no idea what they’re looking for, what a defect actually looks like, or how they’d even recognise one if it was in front of them. To me, a crack is a crack and a damp patch is a damp patch, and surely everyone can see them and know what they mean? It felt so obvious to me that I nearly didn’t bother writing about it. It turned out people wanted to know, and needed someone to write about it.
The knowledge gap is the business
Nobody pays to learn something they already know — what they pay for is closing the distance between where they are and where you already are.
And even if they do already know what you know, very often they’ll pay for the confidence that what they know is what they need to know. On top of that, many who already know what you know will pay anyway if you can show them how to actually implement it.
So the size of that knowledge gap, and the experience gap, isn’t something to apologise for. It’s the entire product. The more automatic something feels to you, the more likely it is that somebody else will pay real money to skip the years it took you to learn it, and to implement it.
A quick way to check whether you’re the exception
Ask yourself one question: has anyone ever come to you, unprompted, and asked you to explain something — maybe something you know how to do while assuming everyone else knows how to do it too?
If the answer’s yes, that’s not evidence everyone already knows it. It’s the opposite. It’s evidence that at least one person didn’t, and went looking for someone who did.
Where this goes next
If either of those doubts has been quietly stopping you from sharing your knowledge and experience, the next few pieces here walk through how to actually find your version of this — what you know that’s worth packaging, and how to tell the difference between “everyone knows this” and “everyone I know knows this,” which are not the same thing at all.