The Curse of Knowledge Is Stopping Your Best Experts From Ever Teaching — And They Don't Know It

There is a specific kind of frustration that only happens to people who are very, very good at what they do.

It sounds like this:

"I sat down to plan my course and just... froze. I know this subject inside out. I've been doing it for twenty years. But the moment I tried to structure it, it all fell apart. Where do I even begin?"

Or this:

"I recorded my first module and played it back. It felt like I was talking in another language. Like I was explaining it from halfway up the mountain, and my students were still in the car park."

Or, perhaps most painfully of all:

"I think maybe I'm just not a natural teacher."

Here's the thing. You probably are.

But there is a cognitive phenomenon so well-researched, so consistent, and so quietly devastating to course creators that it has its own name. Harvard economists have studied it. Stanford psychologists have tested it. And it is disproportionately affecting the exact people who have the most valuable knowledge to share.

It's called The Curse of Knowledge.

And understanding it might be the single most liberating thing you read this year.

What the Research Actually Says

In 1990, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment that became one of the most cited studies in communication research.

She divided participants into two groups: tappers and listeners. Tappers were given a list of well-known songs and asked to tap out the rhythm on a table. Listeners had to guess the song.

Before the experiment, Newton asked tappers to predict how many listeners would guess correctly.

Their prediction? 50%.

The actual result? 2.5%.

Twenty-five attempts per correct guess. The tappers were stunned. To them, the melody was obvious — they could hear it in their heads as they tapped. But the listeners only had a series of irregular knocks.

The tappers knew the song. And that knowledge made it almost impossible for them to imagine not knowing it.

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something deeply, we lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to know it.

And if you have spent years or decades mastering your field? The gap between what you know and what a beginner needs to understand first is not just large. In many cases, it's invisible to you, because your brain has quietly moved the foundational steps below the level of conscious thought.

Why Experts Are Actually the Hardest People to Learn From

This is uncomfortable to sit with, because it runs counter to everything we assume.

Surely, we think, the most qualified person is the best person to teach the subject.

But cognitive science tells a more nuanced story.

When we develop expertise in a field, our brain undergoes a process called automaticity, the transformation of deliberate, effortful steps into automatic, unconscious ones. Think about how you drive now versus the day you sat in a car for the first time. Every gear change, every mirror check, every distance calculation, once conscious, now invisible.

The same thing happens with professional knowledge. A surgeon does not think through every micro-movement of their hands. A seasoned accountant does not consciously narrate every logical step of a tax structure. An experienced therapist does not consciously trace every decision they make in a session.

The steps are there. They just aren't as accessible as they once were.

Which means that when an expert sits down to design a course, they are not withholding anything. They are not being lazy, arrogant, or unclear. They genuinely cannot see the steps that a beginner needs, because those steps have become part of their unconscious competence.

Research in educational psychology consistently confirms this. Studies show that experts are significantly more likely to overestimate what a learner already understands and to skip steps that feel obvious, even when those steps are not obvious at all.

The Signs You're Caught in the Curse

You might recognise some of these.

You explain a concept, and students look blank. So you explain it again, just more slowly. Still blank. You start to wonder if the problem is them, but the problem is the entry point. You started three steps too far in.

Your course outline feels too basic to you. You look at your module plan and think, "Surely they don't need me to explain that?" So you cut it. Then learners struggle, because that was exactly what they needed.

You struggle to define a clear starting point. Because to you, everything connects to everything else, and it all feels equally important. Your brain can't find the beginning because, for you, there is no longer a beginning.

You underestimate how long it takes beginners to grasp something. What takes you three seconds to process might take a new learner three weeks to properly absorb, but you can't feel that gap from where you're standing.

You write content that's comprehensive but not transformational. You include everything because everything feels relevant. And students end up with more information than they can possibly use.

We saw every single one of these in a client we'll call Sarah, for privacy, a highly respected occupational therapist with over 18 years of clinical experience, who came to us wanting to turn her specialist knowledge into an online programme for people returning to work after burnout.

Sarah was brilliant. Her peers knew it. Her clients felt it. But when she sent us her first course outline, it ran to 47 modules. She had included assessment frameworks, neurological background, case study analysis, clinical research summaries, self-reflection tools, all of it accurate, all of it hard-won, and almost none of it what a person in burnout recovery needed to encounter in week one.

When we gently asked her, "If someone finishes this course and fully implements it, what's different for them?" she paused for a long time.

"They go back to work," she finally said. "And they don't end up back where they started."

That single answer unlocked everything. We rebuilt the programme around that destination. Twelve modules. A clear progression. An experience that felt like being guided by exactly the right expert because it was. The difference wasn't in Sarah's knowledge. It was in how that knowledge was organised for someone who didn't yet have it.

"You cannot be cursed by knowledge you don't have. The Curse of Knowledge is, in its own strange way, a mark of genuine mastery."

What Instructional Design Actually Does

This is where most conversations about online courses go quiet.

People talk about cameras, platforms, marketing funnels, and launch strategies. But they skip past the thing that determines whether a course actually works: translating deep expertise into a carefully sequenced learning experience.

That translation is what instructional design does.

An instructional designer doesn't add knowledge to a course. They work with the expert to uncover the steps that have become invisible, sequence them in the order a learner needs to encounter them, and strip out everything that serves the expert's completeness instinct rather than the learner's growth.

The result is something that feels deceptively simple to the expert, "surely it can't be this straightforward?" but lands like a revelation to a student who has been struggling to understand the same thing explained ten different ways.

It is also, incidentally, what separates the courses people finish from the courses that quietly collect digital dust.

The Question That Changes Everything

There is one question that cuts straight through the Curse of Knowledge.

Not "What do I know about this?"

Not "What should I include?"

But this: "If my student fully implemented this course, what would be measurably different in their life or work?"

Start there. End there. Build everything in between in service of that answer.

When you know where the student is going, you can design backwards, mapping out the specific capabilities, understandings, and mindset shifts they need to acquire, in the sequence they need to acquire them. That process almost always reveals how much of your existing knowledge does not need to be in the course and what the real foundational steps were all along.

It's a different kind of intelligence from the expertise you've spent years building. But here's the good news: you don't have to develop it alone, and you don't have to develop it from scratch.

What This Means for You

If you've been staring at a blank module outline, or recording lessons you're not happy with, or quietly convincing yourself that maybe you're just not cut out to teach, please hear this:

The block you are experiencing is not a reflection of how much you know. It's a reflection of how much you know.

The Curse of Knowledge is, in its own strange way, a mark of genuine mastery. You cannot be cursed by knowledge you don't have.

But mastery and teachability are two different skills. The first is what you've spent your career building. The second is what we help you develop.

The most valuable courses in the market right now are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones built by the deepest experts, with the right design behind them, courses that take someone from where they are to where they want to be, step by carefully structured step.

Your knowledge deserves that design.

Your students deserve that experience.

And frankly? The industry deserves more courses built by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Ready to Find Out What Your Course Could Look Like?

If you've been sitting on expertise that should be a course, we'd love to have a conversation about what that could look like — properly structured, deliberately designed, and built to deliver the transformation your students came for.

Book a Course Design Consultation →

Or explore how we work with subject matter experts at every stage, from idea to launch:

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At The Customer's Shoes, we've spent 25 years in instructional design and 15 years building on Kajabi. We don't just help you create a course — we help you create one worth finishing.

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