The Curse of Knowledge Is Killing Your Message, ep44 Hardcore and At Ease #messagingtips

Here's the thing that no one warns us when we're in deep building mode: the more you know about your own work, the less you can see it. This is not a discipline problem, and it's not a preparation problem. This is something that you cannot fix just by working harder or thinking more carefully. This is a cognitive bias that economists have named way back since 1989. It's the curse of knowledge. Researchers Caramar, Lowenstein, and Weber identified it in the Journal of Political Economy. The idea is this: once you gain expertise in something, you lose the ability to accurately reconstruct what it felt like not to have that expertise. Your knowledge rewires how you see the thing, and you cannot unsee it. Chip and Dan Heath brought this into the mainstream with their book Made to Stick. They describe a study that I I find myself thinking about constantly. Participants tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table, just with their knuckles on a hard surface, drumming along like my uncle, and they asked someone sitting across from them to guess what song it was.