Knowledge is a curse and it’s likely the top thing blocking you from making great developer content. 🧠🧙♀️
In 1990, Stanford researchers set out to study how knowledge makes us overconfident. In an experiment, they asked one group of people to tap the melody of a well-known song (such as “Happy Birthday”) on a table. They asked another group to listen and name the song.
After tapping 120 songs, only 2.5% of the songs were correctly named. But that’s not the surprising part.
The group tapping the songs? They predicted the listeners would guess the songs correctly 50% of the time. The gulf is huge: Tappers believed they would succeed in communicating one in two times; in reality, they only succeeded one in forty times.
And this is the curse of knowledge: The tappers knew the songs so well that they believed merely tapping the melodies would be enough to communicate them. And they were wrong.
So, how does this apply to developer content? Well, there’s a small twist. In the experiment, the participants had to tap and had to listen. When creating content, you’re always facing the question “Should I write this at all?” 😬
And that’s where the curse of knowledge is most deadly. It’s all too easy to assume that your audience either already knows what you’re talking about or knows the general topic well enough that a post about it won’t be interesting. But that’s the curse of knowledge speaking and just like the tappers in the experiment, you’re wrong.
Did your development team solve a challenging technical problem recently? Write about it. 📝
Did your founding team choose a framework that’s still shaping decisions today? Write about it. 📝
Did you see a big problem on the horizon that ended up having little to no consequence? Did you see or miss a small problem that ended up having big consequences? Write about it. 📝
Here’s the hack to shortcut your curse of knowledge: If it’s interesting to you, it’s interesting to someone else. Ultimately, you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know what your readers don’t know. 🧠
There will still be work to be done to make a post approachable to an outsider or work to make it maximally interesting or relevant but the seed of a good and worthwhile idea is your own interest.
And no matter how much you know, don’t let knowledge fool you into thinking you already know what your readers want.
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