The trick is to treat knowledge as a tool we can pick up and put down. Or, even better, use it as instinct and intuition rather than explicitly applied. Sometimes, the most expert thing we can do is pretend we're not an expert at all

I've spent the better part of my life accumulating knowledge like a magpie hoarding bottle caps, only to discover that knowing exactly what I'm doing has become the intellectual equivalent of a straitjacket.

Yesterday, I caught myself in this trap during a discussion about new initiatives we're launching. As my young colleague shared their vision for one project, I found myself constructing an elaborate scaffold of potential pitfalls, strategic considerations, and optimization metrics. Then I saw it – the subtle dimming of their enthusiasm as my "exper... See more