Quote
“The Curse of Knowledge: once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.”— Chip Heath & Dan Heath, in Made to Stick (2007) · Made to Stick →
Why it was said
Chip and Dan Heath name the curse of knowledge in the introduction of Made to Stick and return to it in every chapter. It rests on the tapper-and-listener experiment, in which people tapping a well-known song predicted listeners would guess it half the time; they guessed one time in forty.
What it actually means
The expert cannot hear how they sound to a novice, because the knowledge that makes them expert has become invisible to them. Every unread update and lost presentation has this at its root: the writer supplied the melody in their head and the reader received the tapping. The sentence explains why trying harder to be clear does not work, and why finding the one sentence a stranger must remember does.
How to use it
- 1Before sending anything, write the one sentence a reader with none of your context should remember, and put it first.
- 2Have someone outside the project read your message and tell you what it asked for.