You've spent years in your field. You know the terminology, the frameworks, the nuance behind every decision. That expertise is hard-won — and it might be getting in your way.

There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Once you know something deeply, it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was like not to know it. The language that feels precise to you sounds like static to someone hearing it for the first time.

For most of history, grocery shopping looked nothing like it does today. You walked into a store, handed a list to a clerk and waited. The clerk fetched flour from one barrel, sugar from another and canned goods from shelves you never touched. Shopping was efficient, but it was also invisible. Customers didn't browse. They didn't linger. They didn't discover.

If you’ve ever built a piece of IKEA furniture, you know the moment. You open the box, spread the parts across the floor and stare at a small paper booklet filled with tiny drawings. No words or explanations; just arrows, dots and the suggestion that this should all make sense.

In 1933, commuters in London were drowning in information. The city’s underground railway had grown rapidly, and official maps tried to show every tunnel exactly as it existed underground. Lines curved and twisted to match geography. Distances were technically accurate. Streets, rivers and landmarks crowded the page. The result was a mess. Riders squinted, hesitated and missed their stops — not because the system was broken, but because the message was.

Think about the brands you recognize instantly — not by their logo, but by how they sound. A certain tone, a turn of phrase, a personality that comes through even in a short email.

Now ask yourself: does your organization have that kind of voice?

You're twenty minutes into a design review, and you feel the focus slipping. It starts with the logo — can it be bigger? Then the color palette comes under fire. It should be bolder but also more approachable. By the time someone suggests adding a tagline, the project is being designed by committee, which rarely ends well.

In 1891, a Salvation Army officer in San Francisco faced a problem that felt overwhelming. Captain Joseph McFee wanted to provide a Christmas meal for people in need, but the organization had no money to do it. Rather than scaling back the vision, he placed a large iron kettle on a busy pier with a simple sign asking passersby to help “keep the pot boiling.”

Every December, millions of people revisit the same stop-motion Christmas specials: The Little Drummer Boy, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and others that feel as much a part of the season as lights and music. Their charm is unmistakable. Their style is instantly recognizable. And remarkably, nearly all of them were created under conditions that would make most modern creative teams freeze.

In the early 1500s, most people in England lived their entire lives without reading a single verse of Scripture in a language they understood. The Bible existed only in Latin, and access to it was tightly controlled. If you couldn’t read Latin (and almost no ordinary man, woman or teenager could), you relied entirely on others to explain what God had said. Faith was filtered through someone else’s interpretation.