I want you to try something. Think about the last three conferences you attended. The panels you sat through, the keynotes you nodded along to, the conversations you had over drinks about what the industry needs to do differently.
Now ask yourself honestly: how much of what you learned did you actually implement?
If you’re like most people in our industry — including me, at various points — the answer is somewhere between “very little” and “absolutely nothing.”
This isn’t a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. And it’s one that Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton identified years ago in their research on what they called the Knowing-Doing Gap. Their finding was simple and brutal: the gap between what companies know they should do and what they actually do is one of the most persistent and costly problems in business.
Not a knowledge gap. Not a skills gap. A doing gap.
Our industry is drowning in knowledge. We have more data, more content, more frameworks, more best practices than at any point in iGaming history. And yet the same problems persist. Cookie-cutter products. Unsustainable acquisition strategies. Retention approaches that haven’t evolved in years. The information to fix these problems isn’t hidden. It’s in the newsletter you read last Tuesday. It’s in the deck from that SBC panel. Everyone knows it. Almost nobody does it.
Why Smart People Don’t Act
So why does the gap exist? Pfeffer and Sutton found several reasons, but one resonated with me more than any other: we treat talking about something as a substitute for doing it.
Think about how many meetings you’ve been in where a problem was thoroughly discussed, intelligently analysed, and then… nothing happened. Everyone left feeling productive because the conversation was good. But conversation isn’t action. Analysis isn’t execution. A beautifully crafted strategy deck gathering dust on a shared drive is worth exactly zero.
James Clear makes a similar distinction that I think is even more useful. He separates motion from action. Motion is when you’re planning, strategising, researching, and learning. Action is when you’re doing something that produces an outcome. Motion feels productive. Action is productive. They’re not the same thing, and confusing them is expensive.
I see this constantly in our industry. An operator spends six months “exploring” a new market. They commission research, attend local events, hire consultants, build internal presentations. All motion. No action. Meanwhile, a competitor launches an MVP in three months, learns from real players, and iterates. By the time the first operator is ready to “execute their strategy,” the market dynamics have already shifted.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Motion is safer than action. When you’re in motion, you can’t fail. You haven’t committed to anything. You haven’t put yourself out there. You’re just “preparing.” But preparation without a deadline for execution is just procrastination wearing a suit.
Closing The Gap
So how do you fix this? Not with more knowledge. That’s like treating dehydration with saltwater. You need to change your relationship with execution.
First, shrink the gap between learning and doing. When you read something useful — in this newsletter, at a conference, wherever — give yourself 48 hours to take one action based on it. Not a big action. Not a strategy overhaul. One concrete step. Send the email. Book the meeting. Brief your team. Start the test. The size of the action matters less than the speed. You’re building a habit of converting knowledge into movement.
Second, stop rewarding motion in your organisation. Look at how your teams report progress. If updates sound like “we’ve been researching X” or “we’re in the process of evaluating Y” week after week, that’s motion. Ask instead: what did we ship? What did we test? What do we know now that we didn’t know last week because we did something, not because we read something?
Third, accept that acting on incomplete information is almost always better than waiting for perfect information. In iGaming, the market moves fast. The operator who acts on 70% certainty and learns from the result will beat the operator who waits for 95% certainty every single time. Perfection is the enemy of progress, and it’s also the most socially acceptable form of cowardice in a boardroom.
I’ll leave you with this. You probably already know what you need to do. To grow your business, to advance your career, to fix the thing that’s been nagging you for months. The knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. It never was.
The question isn’t what do you know. It’s what are you going to do about it? And more importantly — when?
Because the world doesn’t reward the people who know the most. It rewards the people who do the most with what they know.
So close this newsletter and go do something with it.
