Teach What You Know Before It Changes

Everything you know
has a shelf life.

The framework you mastered
is already being described,
somewhere,
as the old way.

That is not a tragedy.

That is weather.

You cannot hold a tool
long enough
for it to become
an inheritance.

But there is one thing
you can do with knowledge
just before it expires,

and it is the only move
that keeps paying
after the expiry date.

Teach it.

Not in a course.
Not from a stage.

In a paragraph
inside a pull request.

In twenty minutes
at a whiteboard
with one person
who asked.

In a note in the repository
that begins
we chose this because.

Here is what happens
when you explain a thing.

You find the three places
you never actually understood,

only used.

You compress it,

and compression is
where understanding lives.

You turn a skill
into a principle,

and the principle
outlives the tool.

That is the trade.

You lose the specifics,
which were leaving anyway,

and you keep the shape,

which is what
you were actually good at
the whole time.

The syntax dies.

The reason it was good
moves house
into whatever comes next.

There is a quieter return
as well.

The person you taught
remembers.

Ten years out,
the map of who trusts you
looks almost exactly like
the map of who you helped
when it cost you an hour
and gained you nothing.

Machines will get
very good
at handing over answers.

They will not be
the person who sat with someone
and noticed
which part
they were afraid of.

So write it down.

Explain it badly
to one person today.

Do it before the tool changes,

because after it changes
you will not remember
what was hard about it,

and what was hard about it
was the whole gift.

Knowledge you keep
depreciates.

Knowledge you hand over
compounds

in someone else's account,

and in yours.

– Serguey Asael Shinder