The Four Stages of Information Gap: 90% of People Fall at the Second Stage. Which Stage Are You At?

What exactly is the information gap? People always say we should break the information gap to avoid being scammed or paying the so - called 'IQ tax', and many people make money from it.

However, few people explain clearly the different stages behind the information gap.

01/ Knowing on the Surface

Short dramas are very popular and profitable. They're charged by episode, and sometimes it can cost over a hundred dollars to finish watching a whole drama. I remember when I was in college, I used to recharge money to read novels. Later, I found it was too expensive, even several times more costly than paper books, so I stopped and basically looked for free resources instead.

This is the information gap. There are free resources everywhere, as well as various paid ones.

The same goes for airplane tickets. The prices may vary on different platforms, or you can get discounts on another platform. The same is true for various memberships.

When someone tells you something you didn't know before and you immediately know what to do, that's the surface - level information gap. It's easy to break through.

02/ Knowing by Analogy

The different stages of the information gap are actually caused by differences among people. The second stage is knowing by analogy.

Knowing one thing is just the start. Inferring other possibilities from that one thing, both in terms of breadth and depth, is a completely different level.

Because behind the information gap is not just a single piece of information, but a kind of information channel.

For example, if you didn't know you could watch short dramas on a certain platform before, once you know, you'll start to wonder if you can watch other things on it too.

If you didn't know you could get a discount on airplane tickets this way before, after knowing, you'll think about whether you can do the same on other platforms or for other means of transportation.

But at this stage, you still just know. The difference is that your knowledge has expanded, but there hasn't been a qualitative change.

03/ Evolving from Nothing to Something

The information gaps about short dramas, novels, airplane tickets, memberships, etc. that we mentioned earlier are still mainly about the consumer side. This also includes many money - saving tricks and ways to get freebies. They all belong to the consumer - end use of the information gap.

From another perspective, if we switch to the production side, we can turn these information gaps into ways to make money.

For instance, you can act as an intermediary and charge fees. Help others buy things or recharge and earn the price difference.

You can also create a community focused on a certain vertical information gap and charge for providing that information. There are common ones like communities for getting freebies or industry report groups.

Of course, it's not limited to these methods. The key point here is the evolution from nothing to something. It means that the information originally presented in one form, and you use it in another way.

04/ Learning with Individual Differences

Stage 3 is about evolving from nothing to something, while stage 4 is a kind of grafting. It's based on your original knowledge and combines some new information to get new results.

The so - called 'individual differences' mean that different people see different information. It's similar to occupational diseases. People who have been working in a certain industry for a long time will understand and absorb different things when they see the same thing.

There's a joke about a programmer. A programmer went to a dating agency and found several bugs on the dating website.

Although it's not that exaggerated in real life, it's quite similar. People have a strong path - dependence.

Everyone absorbs the information gap according to their own cognitive background and then integrates it into their existing business.

05/ How to Use Information Gap Better

The first two stages are relatively simple. You just need to think a bit more after you see something. The latter two stages require you to have other ideas.

By 'other ideas', it means you shouldn't just focus on the thing itself.

How to achieve this? The keywords are 'cases' and 'combination'.

'Cases' mean seeing how others do things, and 'combination' means combining different things.

For example, if you've had the experience of making money on the Internet yourself or have seen others do it, and one day you learn that your friend spent a certain amount of money on a piece of information or a membership.

Then you can combine these two things. You can start selling that thing or other similar things.

Many creative and innovative ideas are generated by combining different information, content, and cases.

These are the four basic stages of the information gap. Reading more, learning more, doing more, and combining more are the ways to take advantage of the information gap.

Daily Reading & Writing by Xiaolu 09/30/2025 [Day 756]