The Curse of Knowledge

One of the greatest obstacles to effective teaching is something psychologists call the curse of knowledge.

Once you know something deeply, it becomes remarkably difficult to remember what it was like not to know it.

Experts often assume that everyone else sees what they see, understands what they understand, and makes the same connections they make.

They forget the years of experience, mistakes, study, and practice that brought them to that point. This is why some of the world's greatest thinkers can make surprisingly poor teachers.

They possess extraordinary knowledge, but they communicate at a level that only other experts can follow. Their explanations become layered with assumptions, jargon, complexity, and detail. They know too much.

The irony is that true mastery is often demonstrated not by making things more complicated, but by making them simpler.

I've always believed that simplicity is one of the highest forms of intelligence.

Take MSTR® as an example. People sometimes look at it and think, "Surely it can't be that simple."

Yet simplicity was never the result of knowing less.

It was the result of knowing more.

Years of observation, experimentation, success, failure, and refinement gradually stripped away everything unnecessary. What remains is a method that is simple to learn, simple to apply, and capable of producing remarkable results.

As the old saying goes, if you can't explain something simply, perhaps you don't understand it well enough yourself.

The challenge for all teachers is resisting the temptation to impress people with complexity. Complexity often sounds clever. Simplicity requires clarity.

And clarity is hard work.

The best teachers build bridges between what they know and what their students need to understand. They don't stand on top of the mountain describing the view. They walk back down the path and guide others up.

So where does that leave me? (That's a rhetorical question you could ask of yourself.)

Am I a great thinker?

Am I a great teacher?

Or am I somewhere in between?

Perhaps the answer doesn't matter quite as much as the question.

What matters is continuing to learn deeply enough to discover new insights, while teaching simply enough that others can benefit from them.

If that's the balance, then maybe that's where I belong - along with the humility to adapt and change my point of view when the light of new thoughts, new ideas and new discoveries shines my way.