What Do You Love About the Internet?
I get asked a lot of questions about discipline, about how to create, and about how to build something that lasts. That’s typical.
But, last week, a friend asked me: what do you actually love about the internet? Not what it's good for. What do you love? I knew the answer right away. I could go down rabbit holes. I could investigate and research. I did not have to wait for a library book. I did not have to depend upon an authority figure to provide me an answer that I had to “trust.”
I grew up in a busy, suburban Southern California town, in the megapolis of Los Angeles. I had the libraries that I went to, and my favorite library was 40 minutes away, and it was huge. When I was younger, I would ask my mom to take me to the library and pick me up later that day. I would spend five or six hours, or whatever time, in the library. I remember sometimes doing my homework and sometimes researching some general topic that piqued my curiosity, and sometimes reading a fiction novel that I had heard about earlier in the week.
My dad had purchased an encyclopedia for our home. It was purchased from Safeway, a grocery store in that area. I remember it was a teaser of an offer: buy the first couple of volumes “A” and the next two were free. But, it was 15 volumes. And an encyclopedia is no good without all of the volumes. Over the next few weeks, we ended up getting all of the volumes of that encyclopedia, from “A” to “Z”. I remember browsing those volumes and just looking for a topic that would interest me. I spent many late nights browsing those volumes.
Now the information is easier to find. It is on my phone, a device that is in my pocket all day. I can browse topics. Look at archived websites and search for the current news.
I have to admit that last night (9/11/26), I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning, watching 3 movies on the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. I still feel a little groggy this morning. I used streaming services available through the Internet. I could find any information I yearned for. Three days ago, on Tuesday, I started my research spree and stayed up until about 2 in the morning.
So, what do I actually love about the Internet? The ability to gather information and satisfy my curiosity. Before it, curiosity had a ceiling. It was bound by what was on the shelf, who you happened to know, and how far someone was willing to drive you. The internet didn't just raise that ceiling. It took it off the building entirely.
The end of asking permission
What I love most is that nobody has to grant you access anymore. You don't need a gatekeeper's approval to learn accounting, or study a language, or read the original text of a court ruling instead of someone's summary of it. A twenty-two-year-old in a small apartment can read the same research, watch the same lectures, and build the same skills as someone with every institutional advantage. The playing field is still uneven in a hundred other ways, but for the first time in human history, information itself stopped being the bottleneck.
I've coached business leaders about how to develop a powerful dashboard. I trained business students about the accounting terms that business uses to grade performance. I’ve discussed with an entrepreneur that it is a completely valid option to try something and to walk away, because the idea wasn’t profitable (to not get caught up in the sunk-cost fallacy).
The internet's quiet miracle isn't speed. It's that it turned generosity into infrastructure, through lectures, conversations, research threads, and rabbit holes. Answers stacked upon answers to turn into something that can pique our ever-expanding curiosity.
What I keep coming back to:
Access. The best teacher in the world is now available to whoever is willing to look for them.
Reach. An interested person can find you, even if they are on the other side of the globe.
Connection. Created work can be appreciated and find an audience. This is a joint connection between two people.
Build something worth finding
The version of the internet I love isn't the algorithm optimized to keep you scrolling. It's the version that still runs on an old, almost naive principle: that if you make something genuinely useful and put it out into the open, it will find the person who needs it, even if you never meet them and never know their name.
You don't need permission to start. You only need something worth finishing, and a place to put it where someone else might find it.
That's the whole engine behind every course I've taught online, every article I've written, every hour I've spent answering a stranger's question in a comment section instead of a boardroom. Because it creates a connection.
So when someone asks what I love about the internet, I reply, it is the closest springboard for two things: connection to other humans and researched information into something that you are passionately curious about. That's worth protecting, worth adding to, and worth being grateful for.