You might be running on vibes

Teaching is the only reliable way to find out what you actually understand.

There’s a gap between being able to do something and understanding why it works.

You can execute perfectly well. The thing gets done, it gets done properly, nobody complains. Then somebody asks you to explain how you decided, and you open your mouth and discover there’s much less in there than you assumed.

I’ve had this happen more times than I’d like.

Why this is the normal condition

Almost everything you learn at work, you learn by doing.

You watch somebody handle a situation, you try it yourself, it works, you keep doing it that way. Nobody sits you down to derive the principles. You aren’t writing operating procedures for your own reasoning, you’re solving whatever’s in front of you and moving on, which is the correct allocation of your time in the moment and produces a specific kind of debt.

So your understanding stays implicit. That’s fine right up until the moment it has to leave your head.

Then somebody asks you to teach them. Or you’re writing documentation, or walking a colleague through your process, and suddenly you have to put words on something you’ve been doing on autopilot for four years.

That’s where you find out whether you’ve structured your thinking or accumulated a habit that happens to work.

What teaching does that doing doesn’t

Teaching forces you to organise your reasoning in a way that execution never requires.

You have to locate the structure underneath the intuition. The actual principles, rather than the particular way you personally happen to do it, which is usually a blend of principle, accident and personal preference that you’ve never separated out. Most of what feels like expertise is that blend, undifferentiated, and it works fine until you try to hand it to someone whose situation differs slightly from yours.

You also can’t explain something clearly if you haven’t thought about it clearly, so the places where you go vague are diagnostic. The vagueness isn’t a communication problem. It’s the shape of the gap.

I started mentoring recently and I keep walking into this. Things I was confident about, could do without thinking, no difficulty at all. Then somebody asks me to talk them through the reasoning and I realise I’ve never organised my thinking about it. Occasionally I find the understanding is thinner than I believed, which is uncomfortable in a useful way.

Being able to do something, and being able to articulate the logic behind it, are two different levels of understanding. Most of us have far more of the first than we assume, and the gap stays hidden as long as we only ever do.

The second-order benefit

There’s something I didn’t expect, which is that articulating your reasoning improves your reasoning.

Once the implicit becomes explicit, it becomes editable. You can look at the principle you just described and notice it’s wrong, or that it only holds under conditions you hadn’t specified. You can’t do that with intuition, because intuition doesn’t present itself for inspection. It just produces answers.

So teaching isn’t only a transfer mechanism. It’s the main way most of us upgrade our own thinking, and it’s largely unavailable to people who never explain anything.

What to do with it

Next time somebody asks you to explain something, resist the urge to deflect with “just read the doc” or “I’ll show you later”.

Try to walk them through your reasoning. Then pay attention to where you struggle, because that’s exactly where your understanding needs more structure. Working that out will make you better at the thing itself, not just better at describing it.

Teaching helps them. It also slowly upgrades you. That’s a reasonably good deal for an hour.