Courtesy Shutterstock

For most of my life, I believed the path to opportunity was paved with information. Read more books. Study smarter people. Collect insights like baseball cards. If knowledge is power, then surely the most informed person wins.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: information is everywhere and opportunity isn’t.

Many of the best opportunities never appear publicly. They aren’t posted on job boards, tweeted, or packaged into online courses. They live in conversations. In DMs. In quiet meetings. In rooms you’re either invited into or you’re not.

The internet did an incredible job democratizing information. Anyone with a phone can learn how to code, invest, write, build, or sell. The problem is that everyone else can too. Information has become abundant and cheap. What’s scarce now is access.

Access to decision-makers. Access to context. Access to trust.

Being in the right rooms matters more than reading the right books because rooms create leverage. Books give you ideas, but rooms give you timing, nuance, and permission. A book might teach you what to do. A room shows you when, with whom, and why now.

When you’re in the right room, you get first dibs on what’s happening. You learn what people actually care about versus what they say publicly. You see how decisions are made before they’re announced, and sometimes before they’re even fully formed.

That’s how “overnight successes” happen. You didn’t miss the article or tweet. You missed the conversation that happened six months earlier over coffee.

This isn’t an argument against learning. Reading still matters. Curiosity still matters. But information is table stakes. It gets you in the game. It doesn’t win though.

Proximity often does—proximity to people doing interesting things. Proximity to problems worth solving. Proximity to opportunities that are shared instead of advertised.

If you want better outcomes, don’t just ask, “What should I learn next?” Ask, “Who should I spend time with?” and “What rooms am I not in yet?”

Because the biggest breakthroughs in careers, creativity, and business rarely come from discovering new information. They come from being close to the action.

In the same rooms where big decisions are made.