The Curse of Knowledge: Why experts struggle to explain what they do
So you’re at a networking event, or one of those speed dating-style group calls. And of course, someone asks what you do. Then as you answer, you watch their eyes glaze over a few seconds in.
It’s not that you’re boring. It’s not that your work doesn’t matter. It’s not that you hit mute on Zoom without realising.
It’s that you know your work so deeply, so intimately, that you’ve genuinely forgotten what it sounds like to someone who doesn’t.
You’re not alone. This happens so much it has a name. It’s a cognitive bias – yep, as in Psychology 101 – and it’s called the Curse of Knowledge.
Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash
The Curse of Knowledge is a real thing. And a real problem.
In 1990, a Stanford psychology student named Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment. She asked one group of people to tap out well-known songs on a table. Then she asked them to predict how many listeners would be able to identify the tune.
The tappers predicted about 50%. The actual success rate was 2.5%.
It’s a big difference, but it makes sense if you think about it. When you’re tapping a song, you can hear the melody in your head. It’s obvious. To you. It’s “Happy Birthday,” for goodness’ sake! But all the listener really hears is a series of taps. No melody. No context. Just... tapping.
This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once you know something, it’s almost impossible to imagine what it’s like not to know it. The melody plays in your head so automatically that you can’t hear the tapping anymore.
And this is exactly what happens when experts try to explain what they do.
“The ‘right thing’ to say is almost always found in your clients’ words. Not yours.”
The better you are, the harder it gets.
The really tricky part is, the Curse of Knowledge doesn’t get easier with experience. It gets worse. The better you get at your work, the more fluent you become in its language, its shorthand, its assumptions. You forget what it’s like not to know what you know.
Everything feels like common sense to you — because to you, it is.
But it isn’t common sense to the people you want to help. It can’t be. That’s the whole reason they need you.
So when you explain your work with the context that makes perfect sense inside your head, you’re essentially tapping out a song that only you can hear. Your potential clients aren’t nodding along to the melody. They’re politely listening to tap-tap-tapping.
It’s not about intelligence, yours or theirs. But it IS one of the most common reasons brilliant experts struggle to attract the clients they’re best suited to serve.
What it looks like in real life.
I worked with a client — Anna — who’d built a brilliant career in corporate merchandising. She was exceptionally good at her work: the art and science of figuring out exactly how much of which products a particular store needed to have on offer, and when. She’d done this for high street and luxury brands from TopShop to Harvey Nichols.
When Anna decided to become an independent merchandising consultant, offering her expertise to smaller retailers, she found it really hard to get going. Not because she didn’t know what to do. Because she didn’t know what to say.
The vocabulary that had served her perfectly among colleagues at national retailers — the industry jargon, the technical shorthand — meant almost nothing to the independent shop owners she wanted to help. They had the exact problems she could solve. They just didn’t know what to call them. Anna could see that her words weren’t landing. But because Anna was so fluent in the language of her expertise, she didn’t understand why.
It’s frustrating when you meet someone you know you can help and would love to work with, and they’re just not getting what you’re saying about what you do. But it’s hard to figure this out on your own when you’re so close to your work that you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to know all that you know.
Anna didn’t need to become a better merchandiser. She needed to learn to talk about her work in a new way — in her clients’ words, not her own.
Once we did that work together — uncovering how her ideal clients actually described their problems, in their language, from their perspective — everything shifted. Two years later, the way Anna talks about her business still stems from what we found.
It’s not what you know. It’s what they need to hear.
The instinct, when you sense that someone isn’t getting it, is to explain more. Add more detail. Give more context.
But more information almost never fixes a communication problem. Often, it makes it worse.
Because the problem isn’t that you haven’t said enough. It’s that you haven’t said the right thing. The thing that makes someone think, “Oh — that’s exactly what I need.”
That “right thing” almost always lives in your client’s language, not yours. It’s the words they use when they describe the problem they’re trying to solve. The way they talk about what’s frustrating them, what they’ve tried, what they wish existed. The questions they’re Googling or asking their robot of choice about late at night.
Not the way you’d describe it at an industry conference.
This is why curiosity is so central to getting your messaging right. Not curiosity about your own work — you have plenty of that. Curiosity about how others experience it. What it looks like from where they’re standing. What they’re actually searching for when they need what you offer.
When you can describe your work in a way that reflects their reality, not yours, the energy changes. They feel understood. And when they feel understood, they trust you to meet them where they are. They choose you, because you get them.
Why it’s hard to fix alone.
I know. You’re smart, capable, resourceful. You could probably figure this out if you sat with it long enough.
But here’s the thing. The Curse of Knowledge is a blind spot by definition. You can’t see it precisely because you’re inside it. It’s like trying to read the label from inside the jar, as the saying goes. You know what’s inside, because you’re there. But it’s what’s on the label that has to speak to the person you’re asking to choose you.
Every time you sit down to rewrite your LinkedIn headline, or rework your website copy, or prepare for a speaking or networking event, you’re drawing from the same well of expertise that created the problem in the first place. You might find different words. But they’re still your words, shaped by your perspective, filtered through your knowledge.
What you actually need is someone who can see your work with fresh eyes. Who’s genuinely curious about what you do but doesn’t already know it inside out. Someone who can sit between you and your audience and find the bridge — the words and the framing that let your expertise land the way it deserves to.
It’s not that you need someone to tell you what your work is. You know that better than anyone. You need someone to show you how it looks from the other side.
The ripple effect of getting it right.
When your messaging clicks into place — when the way you talk about your work genuinely reflects how your ideal clients think about their problems — it changes more than your marketing.
Networking gets easier, because you know what to say and you can see it land. Content stops feeling like a chore, because you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you sit down to write. Your website starts working for you, because visitors feel like you’re speaking directly to them. Referrals become more relevant, because the people who know you can finally articulate what you do best. And selling feels less “salesy,” because you’re not convincing anyone of anything. You’re just describing, clearly and specifically, how you can help. You’re being genuinely useful.
This is what I mean when I say that marketing can feel like sharing, empathising, helping. Like finding your people.
But it starts with being willing to step outside your own expertise long enough to see it from someone else’s point of view. And that’s the bit that’s genuinely hard to do on your own.
So. What now?
If you read this and thought, “Yep, that’s me,” you’re in very good company. Almost every expert I work with has some version of this experience. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at communicating. It means you’re really good at what you do.
But recognising the problem is only the first step. The next step is getting an outside perspective on what signals you’re actually sending when you show up for your business — and how to shape them so the right people hear exactly what they need to hear.
That’s what the Signal Finder is designed to do. It’s a diagnostic session and strategic assessment that gives you a clear, honest picture of where your messaging is landing now, where the gaps are, and what to do about it. So you can move forward with clarity and confidence, instead of rewriting your headline for the nineteenth time.
If this sounds like the perspective you’ve been missing, find out more about the Signal Finder here.
