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- Oct 9, 2012
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I had to get directions from a girlfriend the other day. After she gave me the directions, she asked me if that made sense.
"Sorry, you'll have to explain that again, it's not clear to me," I said.
"Well it's clear to ME!" she said.
I chuckled a little bit, and said, "It doesn't matter how clear it is to you. I'm the one who needs to use the information. It could be the clearest thing in the world to you, but if it doesn't make sense to me I will still end up lost wandering around town and won't be able to find the place."
--
I find this to be one of big differences between someone who is able to explain something well and someone who isn't. A good teacher vs. a bad teacher, for instance. We can split it up this way:
This is why you get very talented naturals, able to sleep with scores of women, who are not good at explaining how to do what they do. When they attempt to describe it, they put it in a way that is easy for them to understand, but that is not clear to the student how to replicate their results.
When you challenge a bad teacher on his meaning or his method, he may get angry and tell you it's so clear, and ask you why you can't see it. He may question your intelligence or your competence. From his point of view, this thing he's explained makes perfect sense, and he cannot understand why you don't see it or cannot appreciate what he's shared with you.
It is more work to be a good teacher. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the student and see things the way the student sees them. Very often this means imagining you have a completely different set of values, a different way of seeing the world, and a different (often more limited) set of experiences to draw from.
This applies to women too. When you're new, a lot of the time the best advice is to hold your tongue, because if you're not experienced with women and don't have a good mental model for how women see the world, you'll tend to state opinions or pass judgments that grate against women's ways of seeing things. Once you're more experienced with women though, you can put all kinds of things into 'womanese' and communicate even controversial ideas in ways women can get on board with.
Probably worth noting that the "good teacher/bad teacher" dichotomy is subjective. 9 out of 10 people might think you're an excellent teacher, while the last guy doesn't understand anything you say and thinks it's too hard to listen to you. Often this is down to learning styles... the best teachers convey lessons in multiple ways, to get the message across to broad swaths of students. But there are always some students - usually those with the most opposite learning styles to the teacher's teaching style - who aren't going to connect with him.
Anyway, just something to think about any time you're in a position to have to explain something to someone, or teach, or communicate an idea that perhaps your listener is opposed to or doesn't have a good frame of reference for.
Good, effective, persuasive teachers put things in ways that are simple for the receiver to understand. The better the teacher, the more the student will react with a kind of, "Of course! It seems so simple!" reaction.
Bad teachers explain things in ways that make sense to themselves, but don't necessarily make it easy (or even possible) for their listeners to decipher what they are trying to say.
But it's not about how simple an idea seems to you. It's about how simple you make the idea for the listener. That's the only thing that actually counts.
Chase
"Sorry, you'll have to explain that again, it's not clear to me," I said.
"Well it's clear to ME!" she said.
I chuckled a little bit, and said, "It doesn't matter how clear it is to you. I'm the one who needs to use the information. It could be the clearest thing in the world to you, but if it doesn't make sense to me I will still end up lost wandering around town and won't be able to find the place."
--
I find this to be one of big differences between someone who is able to explain something well and someone who isn't. A good teacher vs. a bad teacher, for instance. We can split it up this way:
- A good teacher puts things in a way that makes it easy for the student to understand
- A bad teacher puts things in a way that makes it easy for the teacher to understand
This is why you get very talented naturals, able to sleep with scores of women, who are not good at explaining how to do what they do. When they attempt to describe it, they put it in a way that is easy for them to understand, but that is not clear to the student how to replicate their results.
When you challenge a bad teacher on his meaning or his method, he may get angry and tell you it's so clear, and ask you why you can't see it. He may question your intelligence or your competence. From his point of view, this thing he's explained makes perfect sense, and he cannot understand why you don't see it or cannot appreciate what he's shared with you.
It is more work to be a good teacher. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the student and see things the way the student sees them. Very often this means imagining you have a completely different set of values, a different way of seeing the world, and a different (often more limited) set of experiences to draw from.
This applies to women too. When you're new, a lot of the time the best advice is to hold your tongue, because if you're not experienced with women and don't have a good mental model for how women see the world, you'll tend to state opinions or pass judgments that grate against women's ways of seeing things. Once you're more experienced with women though, you can put all kinds of things into 'womanese' and communicate even controversial ideas in ways women can get on board with.
Probably worth noting that the "good teacher/bad teacher" dichotomy is subjective. 9 out of 10 people might think you're an excellent teacher, while the last guy doesn't understand anything you say and thinks it's too hard to listen to you. Often this is down to learning styles... the best teachers convey lessons in multiple ways, to get the message across to broad swaths of students. But there are always some students - usually those with the most opposite learning styles to the teacher's teaching style - who aren't going to connect with him.
Anyway, just something to think about any time you're in a position to have to explain something to someone, or teach, or communicate an idea that perhaps your listener is opposed to or doesn't have a good frame of reference for.
Good, effective, persuasive teachers put things in ways that are simple for the receiver to understand. The better the teacher, the more the student will react with a kind of, "Of course! It seems so simple!" reaction.
Bad teachers explain things in ways that make sense to themselves, but don't necessarily make it easy (or even possible) for their listeners to decipher what they are trying to say.
But it's not about how simple an idea seems to you. It's about how simple you make the idea for the listener. That's the only thing that actually counts.
Chase
