Tuesday Email: The Curse of Knowledge

Read time: ~ 3.30 minutes

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

The better you get, the worse you teach, costing you more than you know.

Have you ever tried explaining something you're good at—like using your phone or finding information online—and found yourself saying, "It's just so simple!" only to watch the other person's face cloud with confusion? That moment of disconnect isn't just frustrating—it's a universal human experience that silently sabotages our most important professional relationships.

Here's the counterintuitive truth: The more skilled you become at something, the worse you become at explaining it to others.

This isn't a personality flaw—it's a feature of how our brains work, one that neuroscientists have dubbed "the curse of knowledge."

Imagine trying to unhear a melody once you've learned it, or unseeing a visual illusion after someone has pointed out the trick. It's impossible. Knowledge permanently rewires our neural pathways, making it extraordinarily difficult to remember what it was like before we knew something.

I learned this lesson through painful experience. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead in the small conference room as I waited, drumming my fingers against the polished table. My heart raced with anticipation. After months of research, countless sketches, and finally finding the right developer, today was the day my vision would start becoming reality.

"I think you're going to be really excited," the developer said, his face bright with accomplishment as he opened his laptop. I leaned forward, already imagining how this moment would change everything—how this technology solution would transform our business and solidify my reputation as an innovator.

The screen flickered to life. My smile froze.

"What do you think?" he asked, pride evident in his voice. What I saw bore almost no resemblance to the elegant, intuitive system I had described. The colors were wrong, the layout was clunky, and the user journey made no sense.

"This is... interesting," I managed, my stomach dropping like I'd missed a step on a staircase.

In that five-second moment—the gap between expectation and reality—I realized something profound. The crystal-clear vision in my mind had never truly left it. All those conversations where I nodded along thinking, "Yes, he gets it," all those examples I showed, assuming he saw exactly what I saw—none of it had bridged the gap. I hadn't failed to find a competent developer.

I had failed to translate my expertise into a language a newcomer could understand.

When we master a skill, something fascinating happens in our brains. The individual steps that once required careful attention become automatic, shifting from our conscious mind to our unconscious processing center. It's as if you've traveled the same winding path so many times that the map in your mind has faded, leaving you unable to appreciate the clarity someone needs when tracing it for the first time.

This transformation fundamentally changes how we perceive tasks. What once felt complex now seems intuitive. The cognitive load disappears. And with it goes our ability to empathize with beginners struggling through the process we now find effortless.

Even more challenging is the way knowledge permanently alters our perception. Learning new information is like putting on tinted sunglasses. Once they're on, everything you see is colored by that tint—no matter how hard you try, you can't see the world exactly as you did before. We internalize information so completely that recalling our previous state of ignorance becomes nearly impossible.

Our brains also employ a clever efficiency trick: they compress complex information. Packing a suitcase neatly consolidates individual clothing items into one piece of luggage, letting you handle it effortlessly as one unit, but once zipped, you lose sight of exactly what's packed inside. Our brains do the same with complex processes, chunking small steps together until we forget they were ever separate.

This compression saves mental energy but creates a significant communication problem. When asked to explain a process, we face the exhausting task of unpacking information our brains have already neatly compressed. Given our limited cognitive resources, we often take shortcuts, assuming others see the world as we do—a recipe for miscommunication.

AI and virtual reality might offer us a way around these limitations. These technologies can act like a recipe book that never wears out, always open to exactly the right page, recalling each measurement and step that our minds have long since simplified or forgotten.

We aren't going to overcome our human nature. But awareness creates possibility.

For wealth managers especially, our expertise is both our greatest asset and our greatest communication barrier. The solutions we see as obvious after years in the profession remain opaque to our clients and new employees.

Imagine what might happen if we mastered this translation skill—the power to efficiently move knowledge from expert minds to novice ones. The ability to replicate, scale, and delegate would create time and space for what matters most: deep client relationships that transform lives.

The ownership of wanting to control the client experience is real. But we must be able to scale that experience over time to grow and impact more people. To do that, we must get better at communicating the invisible steps in our expertise, whether to AI, to team members, or clients themselves.

The difference between good and great may lie not in what we know, but in how well we can share what we know.

The best is ahead!

-Matt