Most Academics Are Invisible (And Don't Even Know It)

If you're not building bridges with your expertise, you're building walls without windows.

Don’t stay invisible.

There’s a growing chasm in academia that nobody talks about openly, but everyone feels happening. It’s the crushing divide between those who treat their knowledge as a fortress and those who treat it as a bridge. The gatekeepers vs. the open learners.

On one side, you have researchers who guard their insights like precious secrets, publishing in journals that three people will read, presenting at conferences that change nothing beyond their CV. And pretending that this gives them a cognitive advantage (and prestige) over the rest of the population. They measure success only by their citation numbers and ever-larger grants that fund more isolation for themselves and their academic peers. The air is thin where the elite flourishes among themselves.

On the other side, you have academics who refuse to let their expertise die in those dusty Hogwardian idea forges detached from the realities of life itself. They launch newsletters that reach thousands, build digital tools that solve real problems, run workshops that transform entire industries. They measure success by impact that ripples outward. They don’t pursue knowledge just for its own sake but to push the boundaries of collective human understanding.

I call the latter approach academic entrepreneurship. Academic entrepreneurship to me is exactly that: Making a lasting impact not confined to the dusty walls of the ivory tower but teaching the lives of real people everywhere.

The rift between these two approaches widens every day, and here’s the dangerous part: most people don’t even realize which side they’re on, yet.

When you hoard knowledge, you create scarcity around your expertise. When you share it strategically, you create abundance and authority. The traditional academic believes that exclusivity equals value. The academic entrepreneur understands that accessibility multiplies value.

While the fortress-builders wait for institutional permission to matter, the academic entrepreneurs create their own platforms. They share freely. They are not afraid to charge for their expertise. While one group debates the ethics of popularizing their work, the other group is already changing lives with it.

This creates a self-perpetuating cycle. The fortress-builders become increasingly irrelevant as the world moves faster than their publication schedules can accommodate. AI is putting gasoline on that fire. Meanwhile, the academic entrepreneurs gain momentum with each newsletter subscriber, each workshop participant, each tool they release into the world.

The fortress-builders justify their isolation by calling it a pure approach to research. They are peacocks in a pigeon coop. Everyone else is just the supporting cast to their story. The academic entrepreneurs, though, understand that unused knowledge is just expensive entertainment. They prefer to let their actions speak for themselves. Reality connects to them and they won’t be swayed by inflated self-importance.

Here’s the main thing that separates them: the academic entrepreneur doesn’t wait for someone else to translate their work into impact. They don’t need a intermediary to explain why their research matters. They build the damn bridge themselves—from insight to application, from theory to transformation.

The legacy fortress-builders think entrepreneurship corrupts academic integrity. The academic entrepreneurs know that irrelevance is the real corruption.

When you keep your knowledge locked away, you’re not protecting its purity. No, you’re just ensuring its irrelevance. When you share it strategically through entrepreneurial channels, you’re not a capitalist diluting its value but you’re multiplying its impact.

The academic entrepreneur doesn’t abandon rigour for reach. They use reach to amplify the rigour they’ve been owning as scientists. They understand that knowledge without application is just elaborate procrastination leading nowhere.

This gulf widens because each approach feeds on itself. Isolation breeds more isolation. Impact breeds more impact. Irrelevance compounds daily, but so does influence. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather ride a wave of influence to the shores of meaning than to get swallowed by a tide of irrelevance.

The choice is binary and urgent: Will you build a fortress around your expertise, or will you build a bridge with it? Join me here in becoming an academic entrepreneur.