The most useful thing you know is probably something you have stopped noticing that you know.
You have watched this happen. You explain a task to someone, they nod, and an hour later they are stuck on a step you never mentioned because it did not seem worth mentioning. Check out the branch first. Run the thing locally before you trust the test output. Ask the person who owns that service before you touch it, because they will find out anyway.
None of that felt like knowledge to you. It felt like breathing.
That is what expertise does. It compresses the steps until they disappear, and the parts that vanish first are exactly the parts a newer person needs. You remember the hard concepts because they were hard. You forget the small moves, because they stopped costing you anything years ago.
So when you are teaching someone, deliberately say the obvious part out loud.
Narrate while you work. Not the clever reasoning, the boring mechanics. I always open this file first. I never trust this dashboard until I have checked the timestamp. I am going to read the error from the bottom up, because the useful line is usually near the end.
It will feel condescending. It almost never is. What feels patronising to you as a sentence feels like a door opening to someone who did not know that was an option.
And you will be wrong about where the obvious line sits. Every single time. The thing you agonised over whether to explain turns out to be something they already knew, and the thing you skipped in half a second is the thing that cost them the afternoon.
Which gives you a cheap fix. Ask them to tell you back what they are about to do, step by step, before they do it. The gaps show up immediately and nobody has to feel bad about them.
The point of mentoring is not to transmit your conclusions. It is to transmit how you move, and most of how you move is invisible to you now.
Say the obvious part. Someone is waiting for it.
– Asael Shinder
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