Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 8th January 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts. I’ve been thinking about a quiet reason smart people make avoidable mistakes: they treat all information as if it has the same weight.
It doesn’t.
Some knowledge is meant to help you for ten minutes. Some is meant to guide you for ten years. When you mix those up, you either overreact to noise or overcommit to something temporary.
Here’s the simplest way I know to fix it. Sort knowledge by half-life.
At the bottom is moment-to-moment knowledge. The meeting moved to 4 pm. The gate changed. The build is failing. This kind of knowing is not profound, but it saves your day. It’s for coordination, not identity.
Next is “what’s happening right now”. A headline. A viral chart. A sudden policy change. A market spike. Its value is timing. It helps you notice shifts early. But it expires fast. If you let this layer shape your worldview, you will feel informed and still feel unstable, because the input keeps changing.
Then comes situational knowledge. The kind you learn by being close to reality. Customers in this segment are stalling at procurement. This product sells when you bundle onboarding. This team works better with written updates than meetings. This knowledge lasts longer because it is grounded. It is what good operators live on. But it still decays because contexts change.
Above that is playbook knowledge. Tactics that work often enough to be shareable. How to run a sales call. How to interview. How to write a landing page. This layer is useful, but it’s fragile. A playbook that worked in one market or one era can become weirdly wrong later. The mistake is treating a playbook like a law.
Then there is knowledge that lasts because it is about people, not tools. Incentives shape behavior. Friction changes outcomes. Status makes people hide information. Most conflict is misaligned expectations, not bad intentions. This layer does not solve every problem, but it keeps you from being surprised by the same problems. I call it principles for lack of a better word.
Near the top are skills. Writing clearly. Listening well. Negotiating. Building. These decay slowly and travel with you. They also demand practice. You cannot consume your way into them.
And at the top is wisdom, which is just knowledge that survived reality. Knowing what matters. Knowing what to ignore. Knowing when you’re chasing certainty because you’re uncomfortable.
If you want one habit from this piece, make it this: before you act on something you “know” ask what kind of knowledge it is and how long it will stay true.
Short half-life inputs are great for short-term moves. Long-term commitments deserve long half-life knowledge. That’s the whole point.
It’s not about knowing more. It’s about knowing what you’re holding. Thank you for reading!
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.