The Curse of Knowledge.
I’ve talked about this idea before. For all you coaches and owners out there, think about this the next time someone walks through your door wanting to learn more about your program.
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Excerpted from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die:
People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”
And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly.
3 comments
I love how you use lawyers as an example of those who spew forth unintelligible nonsense–thanks, Jon! In all seriousness, though, I totally agree.
This concept explains why Alexander Graham Bell always gets credit for the lightbulb.
I consider this my one marketable and valuable skill. Everything else I do in my life can easily be done by hundreds of other people, many of them better than me. But I am much better at seeing an issue/argument from someone elses’ perspective, explaining that issue/argument to them in a way that will allow it to make sense to them given their perspective, and then relating that issue/argument to other things they may not see as remotely connected. Unfortunately, since I graduated college, I have not been able to utilize this skill in any way that is monetarily useful.
I need there to be a job in which I translate people’s arguments to one another in a way that prevents what happens in most argumentative conflict which is two sides repeating what they think … like two ships passing in the night.
What job is that? It’s not advertising. That’s just sloganeering. Probably not politics since that is often more like advertising. Maybe settling drunken bar bets?
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