Knowing vs. Teaching

Here’s something that trips up nearly every expert who tries to teach: knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it are completely different skills.

You’ve seen this. The brilliant programmer who can’t explain code to a junior developer. The master chef who says “just add a little of this” and can’t tell you how much. The musician who plays beautifully and teaches terribly. Expertise does not automatically produce teaching ability.

There’s a name for why: the expert curse.

The Expert Curse

When you’ve been doing something long enough, you forget what it was like not to know. The steps that were once deliberate and difficult become automatic and invisible. You don’t consciously decide to do them anymore. You just do them.

This is great for performance. It’s terrible for teaching.

Because when someone asks you to explain what you’re doing, you skip steps. Not on purpose — you literally can’t see them anymore. They’ve been absorbed into unconscious competence. What looks to you like “obviously you just do this” looks to the learner like a magic trick with missing steps.

The learner isn’t stupid. Your explanation is incomplete. You just can’t tell, because the missing pieces are invisible to you.

The Five Teaching Skills

Teaching requires its own set of abilities, separate from whatever you’re teaching. Here’s what they are.

Breaking it down. Can you take what you know and chop it into pieces small enough for someone to learn? Not the whole thing at once — discrete chunks that build on each other. This requires you to reverse-engineer your own competence, which is harder than it sounds.

Meeting people where they are. Not where you are. Not where you think they should be. Where they are right now. This means assessing their current understanding accurately and starting from there, not from where it’s convenient for you to start.

Creating conditions for learning. People don’t learn from being told things. They learn from trying things, failing at things, and making sense of the failure. Your job isn’t to pour knowledge into someone’s head. It’s to set up situations where understanding can happen.

Assessing comprehension. Can you tell whether someone got it, or whether they’re nodding and smiling while lost? This is its own skill. Most people are too polite to tell you they’re confused. You have to be able to see it.

Adjusting in real time. When your approach isn’t working — and it won’t always work — can you shift? Try a different angle? Find a new analogy? Most experts have one way of explaining things. When that way doesn’t land, they just say it again louder. That’s not teaching.

An Honest Look

Most people who are good at something have one, maybe two of these five skills. They can break things down but can’t tell if the learner is following. They can assess comprehension but can’t adjust when someone’s stuck. They meet people where they are but can’t create conditions for actual learning.

That’s fine. Teaching skill is developable. You built expertise through practice — you build teaching ability the same way. But you have to know where you’re starting from.

Today’s Practice

Run yourself through these five honestly.

Can you break down what you know into learnable chunks? Think of something you’re expert in. Can you identify the distinct pieces someone would need to learn, in order?

Can you explain to someone who knows nothing about it? Not just the basics — can you make the first step accessible to a genuine beginner?

Can you tell whether someone understood? What signals do you look for? Do you look for them?

Can you adjust when it’s not landing? What do you do when your explanation doesn’t work?

Which of these five is your strongest? Which is weakest?

Write it down. You’re building a development plan for yourself as a teacher, not just as a practitioner. This is a new skill set. Treat it like one.