Why the Clearest Leaders Are the Ones Who Remember What It Felt Like Not to Know

When I was first learning to be an optician, I remember feeling profoundly, almost embarrassingly lost.

What made it sting a little more? I had been around the optical industry since I was six years old. Six. And yet there I was, sitting in training, drowning in a sea of letters. PD. OC. OS. OD. OU. My trainer moved through them like they were the most natural thing in the world, and I was scribbling notes as fast as my hand would move … not just to capture the concepts, but to have a list of terms I could ask about later or look up on Google the moment I got home. (Honestly, it felt a lot like trying to read a text from a teenager. You can tell words are happening. You’re just not entirely sure what the current working definition is.)

But my confusion carried a weight that went beyond just not knowing the vocabulary. I wanted to do well. I wanted to prove that I belonged there. And every acronym I didn’t recognize felt like one more piece of evidence that maybe I didn’t. That emotional layer, the fear of seeming incompetent, meant I wasn’t going to raise my hand and ask. I was going to nod, keep up as best I could, and figure it out later.

Does that sound familiar? Think about the last time you were at a doctor’s appointment and the physician or technician started rattling off clinical terms and acronyms. You sat there thinking, I have no idea what half of that meant, but I don’t want to ask because everyone else in this room seems to understand it just fine. That quiet, slightly anxious nodding? That’s exactly what was happening to me during that training session as an optician.

That memory came back to me recently when I learned about something called the curse of knowledge.

What is the Curse of Knowledge?

It’s a cognitive bias identified in a 1989 paper published in the Journal of Political Economy by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber. The finding? Once we learn something, it becomes nearly impossible to remember what it felt like not to know it. We lose access to our own beginner’s mind. And as leaders, that gap (between what we know and what we assume others know) quietly creates more confusion, more disengagement, and more missed connections than most of us realize.

In 1990, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton designed an experiment as part of her PhD dissertation that brought this to life in a simple, yet unforgettable way. She called it the “tappers and listeners” study.

One group of participants was asked to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song. The other group had to guess the song just from the tapping. Before the experiment, the tappers predicted that listeners would identify the song correctly about half the time.

The actual result? Only 2.5% of listeners got it right.

Here’s why: while the tappers were tapping, they could hear the full song in their heads … the melody, the lyrics, the whole thing. The listeners heard only a series of random knocks. The tappers were so immersed in what they knew that they genuinely couldn’t imagine what the experience sounded like from the outside.

That’s the curse of knowledge in action. We mentally fill in information the other person simply doesn’t have yet, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We think we’re being clear. Meanwhile, the other person is just trying to keep up.

Why This Matters For Leaders

Here’s the truth: our teams, our clients, and our customers are often not experts in what we do. In many cases, that’s exactly why they’re working with us.

Meeting people where they are isn’t dumbing things down. It’s actually one of the most respectful things a leader can do. It says: I want you to have everything you need to fully understand what I’m offering, what I’m asking, and how this helps you.

I was talking with a friend just recently about this. She was preparing to lead a training for a room full of experienced professionals, people who were absolutely seasoned in their field. And we talked about how even with an expert audience, you can’t skip the foundation. You still have to check in on what people actually know, not what you assume they know. The moment you start building from your own knowledge base instead of theirs, you’ve already left someone behind.

Clarity feels like over-explaining to the speaker, yet it feels like relief to the listener.

Practical Takeaways

1. Add one extra sentence of context. When you’re explaining something new, add just one sentence of background before diving in. It costs you almost nothing. For the person listening, it can be the difference between following along and falling behind.

2. Watch your jargon and acronyms. What feels like everyday language inside your organization or industry may be completely foreign to someone outside it. When in doubt, spell it out — at least the first time.

3. Simplify more than feels necessary. It will almost never feel like too much on the listener’s end. Err on the side of clarity, especially when the stakes matter.

Self-Reflection Questions

• Think about the last time you explained something complex to someone … a client, a new team member, a colleague in a different department. Did you check in on their baseline first, or did you start from yours?
• Where in your business are you most likely to assume shared knowledge? Sales conversations? Onboarding? Team meetings? What would it look like to build in one more layer of context there?
• Is there someone in your world right now who might be nodding along, but not fully following? What’s one low-risk way you could open the door for them to ask questions?

Awareness is Key

Looking back on that training session, I wish I had known then what I know now: there is no harm in asking for clarification. Not because the other person is being careless or unkind, but because they may genuinely not realize that the context needed to make sense of everything simply lives inside their own head and nowhere else. Not understanding something isn’t always the listener’s problem. Sometimes it’s the communicator’s problem. That’s the curse of knowledge at work.

One of the simplest and most powerful things you can do, whether you’re the one explaining or the one listening, is to simply ask. “Are you familiar with this?” or say, “I am not familiar with this, can you give me some background first?” It is not condescending. It’s leadership. It tells the other person that you care about them and their success enough that you want them to fully understand.

Some of the best leaders I know aren’t the ones who know the most. They’re the ones who remember what it felt like to not know, and then build that awareness into every conversation they have.

Ready to Lead with More Clarity and Connection?

If this resonated with you, this is exactly the kind of work we do together in a coaching partnership.

Communication, self-awareness, and the human side of leadership aren’t soft skills, they’re the skills that determine whether people follow you willingly or just comply. If you’re ready to dig deeper into how you show up as a leader, I’d love to connect.

Book a complimentary discovery call… and let’s talk about where you are, where you want to be, and how we can close that gap.

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