Teaching requires remembering what confusion felt like before knowledge became obvious.

Once something is obvious to you, the state of not knowing it becomes almost impossible to recall, and that forgetting is what makes experts poor explainers. You skip the step that was hardest, use words that were once opaque, and mistake the learner’s confusion for inattention. Teaching well requires deliberately reconstructing what it was like before.

Before explaining something, try to remember the specific thing that confused you at the start. Begin there. It is usually the exact place the other person is standing.