Predictions are just information asymmetry

The only decent predictions I’ve ever made weren’t true predictions but simple information asymmetry: I saw something happening that other people couldn’t see. When it became mainstream, I seemed more prescient than I really was, as though I had conjured the prediction into life, when in reality I was describing, not predicting.

I am not very good at predictions and this is the only way I have ever had any success. It’s a good exercise to try and extrapolate first-order, second-order, nth-order consequences of any event, but each further extrapolation becomes vastly less and less certain. Much better to start from an observation, something grounded in actual reality, something actually happening.

To become better at prediction, I try to seek out situations that offer information asymmetry. I made decent predictions¹ about the trajectory of content marketing because I worked at a content marketing agency serving a hundred customers simultaneously. If I cared to look, I could see the frontier of content marketing unfolding in real-time, in a way that most people operating in a single company simply could not.