Preface
The Problem Was Never Knowing
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
Years ago I read a book called The Secret, the way it seemed like everyone did for a while.
Its central claim was that wanting something intensely enough was most of the work. Think it clearly enough, want it badly enough, believe it fully enough, and the wanting itself would start pulling the result toward you. I remember being skeptical and hopeful about The Secret’s claim in roughly equal measure, which is probably the right response to any book making that kind of claim.
I think half of The Secret’s claim is wrong. I think the other half is one of the more useful ideas I have come across on this subject. It is worth separating the two halves, because most of us have kept both without noticing that they are different and do not belong together.
Here is the half I think is wrong. Wanting something does not pull that thing toward you. Wanting does not adjust the world in your favor, and wanting has never, on its own, produced a single result for me. I have wanted things badly, for years at a stretch, and the wanting alone never delivered them.
Here is the half I think is useful, and it is the more important one. Setting a goal and actually wanting it are not the same thing. Most people who give up on a goal never notice the difference, because writing a goal down feels like proof that you want it. It is easy to write “lose ten pounds” the same way you write “renew the car registration”: on the same list, with the same weight, which is almost none. A goal written down that way has no real want behind it. And a goal with no want behind it tends not to survive the first stretch where nothing visible happens, because nothing keeps you moving toward that goal when stopping is easier.
A goal you really want survives that first stretch of no visible results, at least for a while. Most abandoned goals were never short on a plan. They were short on want.
There is an old saying: where there’s a will, there’s a way. In other words, if we want something badly enough, we will find a way to get it. We will do whatever it takes. But wanting is not the whole answer, and this is where I think The Secret gets ahead of itself. Wanting is the spark, not the mechanism. A spark starts a fire. A fire starved of air goes out anyway, no matter how strong the spark was, and no matter how many times you strike it again. Wanting gets you to the first attempt. It gets you back for the second and the third, after the first two produced nothing you could see. What wanting cannot do is keep the fire burning by itself, on nothing. Something else has to feed the fire. Figuring out what that something else is became the “want” behind this book.
A year ago, on August 22nd, 2025, at 9:45 on a Friday night, I typed a question into an AI. I know the exact date and time because I still have the file the AI created for me.
I asked the AI how I could get into shape and lose ten pounds. I was specific. I gave the AI my age, my weight, and the number of hours I could realistically work out in a week.
Before I tell you what happened, one thing needs to be clear. Losing those ten pounds was not a goal I had written down out of habit. I really wanted to lose them.
The AI answered in about ten seconds.
The AI’s answer wasn’t just good. It was very good. A training split across four days. Progressive overload explained in plain language. A protein target, a sleep window, a note about how long ten pounds tends to take if you do it properly, and a warning that the first three weeks would feel like nothing was happening. It was more specific and more useful than any plan I had ever had before.
So I did what you are supposed to do with a good plan. I followed the plan.
I joined a gym the following Tuesday. I went to the supermarket that same evening and bought the food the plan called for, including a few things I had never bought before. I printed the plan. I read it again the next morning, and then most mornings after that, the way you reread something you are counting on. I was excited. After years of vague intentions about my belly, I had a real plan and I was taking real action.
For two weeks I worked hard at it.
I went when I said I would go. I ate what the plan said to eat. I was sore in places I had forgotten could be sore, and there is a particular satisfaction in that soreness, because it feels like proof. In the first few days, the soreness was enough. The soreness was evidence that my body was changing.
And every day I would stand in front of the mirror and look for the rest of the evidence.
Every day I saw the same body looking back at me.
Not a slightly better version. Not a version heading in the right direction. The same one. The same shape at the waist, the same softness in the same places, the same person who had typed a question into an AI on a Friday night in August. Fourteen days of doing exactly what an expert plan told me to do, and the mirror had not noticed.
So I missed a workout. Not dramatically, and not as a decision. There was a reason, and it was even a decent reason, and it was the kind of reason that would not have been enough two weeks earlier. Then I missed another. Then there was a lunch where the fast food was easier, and a night where the sweets were already in the house.
By the third week I had fallen off the wagon, as they say, and abandoned the carefully crafted plan the AI had put together for me.
The AI’s plan is still on my computer.
I have spent fifteen years as a solutions architect, which is a fancy way of saying that businesses hire me when they want a solution to a specific problem, usually one that software automation can solve. I can often see the shape of the answer within a few days. That is not a boast. It is context for the question that has bothered me for the better part of a decade.
If I was this good at solving other people’s problems, why was I so consistently bad at solving my own?
My problem was not a lack of knowledge. I knew I had to go to the gym. I knew what to do about the book I kept not writing (this book), the business marketing I kept not doing, the calls to my mother I kept not making. I have never once, in my entire adult life, failed to do something because I could not find out how to do it.
And here is what changed between the beginning of that decade-long search and today, September 20th, 2026: the knowing became essentially free. It was AI’s gift to humanity.
Information used to be gated, and the gate had a price.
Knowing how to do something well meant getting it from someone who already knew how, and that access was usually available only for a price: the degree, the certification, the apprenticeship, the professional body, the consultant, the seminar in a hotel ballroom with bad coffee and a table of books at the back. We built an entire economy on the scarcity of knowledge. Whole professions existed not because the knowledge was complex but because it was gated, and because keeping it gated was worth something to the people who possessed it.
We even had a phrase for it: knowledge is power.
Knowledge is power was not a saying about curiosity. The phrase was a description of a market. Power belonged to whoever had the information, and the transaction that moved information from one person to another was the transaction most of society was built to charge for. The degree, the certification, the apprenticeship, the consultant, the seminar: every one of them is a tollbooth on the same road, and for most of human history, that is simply how it worked.
Economists gave the whole arrangement a name: the information economy. The US has been one since the 1950s, and in large part still is today.
AI is about to change that. It is hard to sell what anyone can get for free.
For almost anything you want to do with your life, a complete and competent set of instructions is available right now, at almost no cost, in a language you speak. Not general instructions. Yours. Adjusted for your age, your schedule, your budget, your injuries, your starting point. A personal trainer could have given me a comparable plan, and helped me carry it out, but at a much greater cost. The AI gave me my plan on that Friday night in August in ten seconds, for free.
The arrival of AI tends to suggest that the knowledge economy is ending, and that something else is beginning. What that something else is, nobody currently knows, including the people building AI.
But we can already say something about what AI will not fix, and cannot fix.
Consider what should have happened as the gates came down. Search engines put most of the world’s how-to knowledge within reach more than twenty years ago, and AI has only made that knowledge faster and more personal. If people give up on changing their lives because they do not know how, then making the how universally free should have produced a visible, generational improvement in what ordinary people achieve. More people finishing what they start. Fewer abandoned plans. A measurable surge in people reaching goals they had been chasing for years, in every area of life.
That improvement did not happen. Nothing close to it happened.
We have more access to information than any generation in history, and we are not noticeably better at achieving our goals. Which tends to suggest that the knowing was never the real problem to begin with.
This next point is rarely said out loud, so I am going to say it plainly and early.
The AI can find the answer. It can write the plan, sequence the steps, adjust the plan when circumstances change, and remind you what you are supposed to do today and every day after. The list of things it can do on your behalf is long, and it gets longer every year. But there is one thing the AI cannot do.
The AI cannot go to the gym and do the reps.
It cannot sit across from your mother on a Tuesday evening and talk with her. It cannot decline the dessert. It cannot put the hours in on the thing you say you want, on the days when nothing about it feels like it is working. The one part of every goal that no one else can do for you is the part where you take action, where you actually do something. Taking action has not been automated, is not being automated, and for most of our goals, cannot be.
So my problem was never knowing. My problem was always doing, and not just doing, but doing consistently. And I have a strong feeling it is the same problem most of us have.
It would be easy to conclude, at this point, that I just did not want to lose those ten pounds enough. If you are halfway to that conclusion already, I want to close that door now. I wanted to lose them. I bought the food that same evening. I printed the plan. I kept the file, which is not something a person does with a goal they don’t really want. The wanting was real, and it still was not enough on its own. Wanting the ten pounds harder was never going to close the gap between wanting and doing.
The gap between wanting and doing leaves a question worth the rest of a book.
If we know what to do, and we want the result, and the instructions are free and excellent and sitting in a file on our computer, what exactly is stopping us?
The usual answers are discipline, motivation, and character, and I spent years assuming one of them was right. They are not wrong so much as they are descriptions of the problem wearing the costume of an explanation. Saying that someone stopped going to the gym because they lacked discipline raises two questions. Where does that discipline come from, and how do you keep it at a steady level? And more importantly, is it enough?
If discipline were enough, you would expect people leaving the military, after years of the most disciplined training most of us will ever see, to keep exercising on their own. Many do not. Researchers following thousands of US service members found that people tended to exercise less after they left the service than while they were in it, and veterans today are about as likely to be overweight as everyone else. The discipline was real. But much of it, it turns out, was supplied by the structure around them: the schedule, the drill sergeant, the formation at six in the morning. When the structure went away, a lot of the discipline went with it.
What I eventually found was a cause that is quieter, more mechanical, and a good deal more hopeful.
People tend to stop doing things when they can no longer see that what they are doing is producing results. Not when the work stops producing results. When the results stop being visible. The two are not the same thing, and the difference between them is where many goals get abandoned. In my case the work was producing results. Fourteen days of training and eating properly does something real to a body. It just does not do anything the mirror is able to report, and the mirror was the only instrument I owned.
And here is what nobody gives people credit for. People do follow their plans. They start them, they work them, and they do what the plan says to do. What they do not do is keep following them, because almost no plan pays out early. The results tend to show up somewhere near the end, which means everything before that has to be done on no evidence at all.
The whole problem, as plainly as I can put it, is not starting. The problem is lasting long enough to reach the point where results finally become visible. Long enough to get some traction.
I did not last long enough. The effort went on for two weeks, the progress built up where I could not see it, and my brain, receiving no evidence, did what brains tend to do with behavior that appears to produce nothing.
I stopped.
The mechanism behind my stopping has a name in physics. It is called traction.
Traction is the grip that turns effort into movement. Where there is traction, force produces progress. Where there is none, the force is still there and nothing moves. Traction turns out to describe human behavior with uncomfortable precision, and traction is what the rest of this book is about.
The gym is only the example I happened to keep the AI’s plan for. The same pattern of starting and stopping had been happening to me for most of my adult life, in every part of my life I actually cared about, and it took me years to work out what was causing it.
The AI’s answer to my question arrived in ten seconds. I followed the plan. Understanding why I stopped following the plan took years. The distance between me starting and stopping is the reason for this book, and its subject.
PS: As I write these pages, one year later, guess what? I am still working on that goal. But this time something is different. I am not waiting for the mirror to tell me whether the plan is working. I went so far as to build an app based on this book:
The Traction Method takes a goal, builds a plan, and breaks the plan into small steps, so the progress that used to be invisible shows up as I go. One year ago, the AI wrote my plan. Today, The Traction Method shows me the plan is working.