26 Principles for 2026: #5 Knowledge Velocity

If you are relying on what you already know, i.e, with your past degree, your decade of experience, to carry you through 2026, you are driving on fumes. Your battery is empty, your mind is out of gas,

“Learn faster than knowledge appears. It’s your only sustainable advantage.” - Futurist Jim Carroll

Futurist Jim Carroll is writing his end-of-2025 / introduction-to-2026 series, 26 Principles for 2026. You can follow along at 2026.jimcarroll.com. He welcomes your comments.

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We are three days into resetting your mindset for 2026.

Day 5? It’s all about learning velocity, and the fact that you need to stop relying on your degree and start learning for your life!

Here’s your chalkboard summary!

I want you to implant this idea firmly in your mind right now: skills decay. Add to that concept the idea of the half-life of knowledge. Layer on top of it my often-repeated phrase - the ability to master just-in-time knowledge is key.

The former is happening faster because the latter is becoming smaller. Once you understand that, you need much of what you need to know for 2026 - your ability to align and realign to the new velocity of knowledge will be key to everything you do.

Think about the change we are in the midst of. In a linear world, your education was a finite event. You went to college, got a degree, learned a trade, or got a set of professional skills, and that block of knowledge was something you could rely upon for a 30-year career with only minor maintenance.

But in an exponential world, knowledge is not just growing; it’s exploding. I’ve written about this a lot, but it bears repeating. I often share on stage the fact that the average half-life of a professional skill has collapsed from 10-15 years to just 5 years today. Or the fact that it is said that half of what you know today will be obsolete in five years, if not sooner. In some high-tech fields, that timeline is compressed even further, with knowledge potentially doubling in a matter of months or even hours.

This means that if you are relying on what you already know, i.e, with your past degree, your decade of experience, to carry you through 2026, you are driving on fumes. Your battery is empty, your mind is out of gas, and you’ll soon hit the limit of where you can go.

Bottom line? The knowledge that got you here is decaying faster than you can replace it with linear learning methods.

In that context, the defining characteristic of a successful professional in 2026 will not be their stock of knowledge, but their rate of learning.

Here’s what you need to do and what you need to think about!