Well, Duh! But...

A funny thing tends to happen with human knowledge.

Things start out as important. These facts are disseminated carefully—first through enthusiasm for sharing insight, but eventually through forced repetition and rote.

Repetition and rote eventually seem unnecessary. Things become so obvious that people stop talking about them. Well, duh! The stove is obviously hot; I wasn’t planning on touching it anyway, so there’s no need to warn me about it.

Why would you waste time and energy stating the obvious? It’s not just that, either—if you’re stating facts that are making the other party roll their eyes, you’re likely to lose your audience entirely. It makes sense, then, that we have these little blind spots where first principles thinking can come in handy.

Yes, but… there is a very good reason to revisit that original insight everyone takes for granted now.

That hot stove you burned your hand on means you don’t need to be warned for next time, but what about someone who hasn’t yet burned themselves? It’s obvious because you’re a grownup person who has probably had the unfortunate experience of searing some skin on said stove. It’s not obvious otherwise.

Otherwise is everything.

We are all naive children in some ways. We all need to be warned about what’s obvious to some people, but not to us.

Teaching jiu jitsu has taught me a ton about this. If you’ve been doing BJJ for a while, certain things are very obvious fairly quickly, like not turning your back to your opponent if possible; or how to always avoid the triangle choke by always having both arms above or beneath their legs when you’re inside the guard.

These are well, duh moments, to be sure. Everyone knows these basic concepts—except the folks who need to internalize this fundamental idea right now.

The fundamentals of BJJ are second nature to me, but for every area of high competency in my life, there are a hundred things I know next-to-nothing about. Whenever I discover or learn something fundamental about one of those topics, I’m grateful for the knowledge that seems obvious to domain experts.