October 30, 2026

Did you ever crawl through one of those cardboard box mazes as a kid? I went through one on Halloween night when I was seven, and I’m still recovering.

It was completely pitch black, with noisy cardboard all around no matter which way I turned. Every now and then I'd hear a scream, which meant someone had either found the way out or given up entirely, punched a hole through the top, and walked out.

I remember feeling stuck with no way out, and I just started crying. An older kid in front of me offered to stick with me until the end. She even had a mini flashlight to help us get out. I was so relieved.

I’m not sure whether kids still do these mazes or if it was just a ’90s thing, but man, it was terrifying. Never again!

This week, I had three calls with founders who were stuck in their own kind of cardboard maze, but the walls were their own thoughts. Each of them could see dozens of ways their work connects and soooo many ways to talk about it.

Everywhere they turned, there was another connection. So when they sat down to post, they got stuck in a cycle of overthinking and freezing. One of them seriously considered punching a whole in the roof and walking away.

What I told each of them: let's find the flashlight before we start panicking.

I reminded them that seeing how everything connects is their superpower. It’s an unusual way of identifying and solving problems, and it’s exactly why people lean in when they start talking. We never want to water that down or shrink it into one narrow lane.

Without clarity and focus, though, you can get trapped in your own head. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge.

You might have this curse if you can see dozens of ways your work connects to other topics that most people would say are unrelated. Congrats, you're in good company.

How the curse began

In 1990, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton wanted to study how knowledge is transferred. She asked people to tap out well-known songs on a table and predict how many listeners would be able to name them. The tappers expected the listeners would name about half, but they only could name three out of 120. That's because the tapper hears the whole melody in their head, while the listener only hears knocking.

Educational psychologists Richard Clark and David Feldon also found that when specialists describe a complex task, they leave out roughly 70% of the decisions they make. 😱

The steps have become so automatic that the expert’s brain no longer shows its work, even to them. Your brain smooths out the tasks so working memory is freed up for harder thinking. Pretty cool, right? But it can also be pretty frustrating.

The hardest part is that you can’t feel the curse working, and the more layered and complex your work is, the more difficult it becomes to retrace your steps and explain what you do.

So if writing one LinkedIn post feels harder than the work you’ve spent decades mastering, it isn’t a sign that you’ve lost your brilliance. It’s a sign of how deep your thinking goes.

The fix: zoom in, then zoom out

I use the zoom in, zoom out method with our clients to keep the full depth of their thinking intact while giving readers a way in.

Here's how it works:

Start by mapping the dots. Before you write anything, get everything out of your head: every connection, theory, acronym, and tangent you’re itching to include. This becomes your map, and it’s evidence of the range that makes your perspective valuable. Write it out or speak it (I use Wispr Flow for brain dumping sessions).

Then zoom in. Pick one dot, and then go smaller still, down to a single story or moment where you watched that idea play out. It might be a specific meeting or a specific frustration. Start there. Experts tend to open with the framework, because to them it’s all one big idea. Readers need the moment first, because a moment is something they can picture.

Then zoom out. Once the reader is standing in the story with you, widen the lens and show why that moment matters beyond itself. This is where many experts overcorrect into abstraction, which is the curse in sheep's clothing. Keep the language concrete as you widen so the bigger point arrives with the particulars intact.

Finally, test it with someone one or two steps removed from your work. Stanford researcher Pamela Hinds found that the deepest experts were the worst at predicting what others would find difficult, while people with only some experience (close enough to understand the subject but not a master yet), were the best. You can’t see the curse from the inside, but a smart colleague in an adjacent field, a client, or a board member can usually point to the exact place where they got lost.

This is why I always have at least one consulting project going along with the agency work we do. Working 1:1 with a founder who doesn't want our team to do the work for them, but rather learn and do it themselves with me as a guide, has been the best way for me to keep that muscle strong.

What this looks like in practice

Let’s say Paul is an engineering leader at a renewable energy company. Everyone in his world knows clean energy projects take too long. What Paul sees, after years of watching it happen, is where the time actually goes, and he needs investors, utilities, and policymakers to understand it too, because they’re the ones who can change it.

When Paul explains it, he tends to list every reason at once: grid waitlists, equipment shortages, permits, studies, and costs. All of it is true, but it won't capture people's attention on LinkedIn. When he tries to simplify, he says something like “The grid is the bottleneck,” which is also true but sounds like everyone else and oversimplifies it.

So instead, Paul zooms in. He picks one moment: a solar farm his team finished building that sat idle for over a year while it waited on a single piece of equipment. Anyone can picture how frustrating this would be.

Then he zooms out. On its own, the idle solar farm is just a frustrating story. Zooming out is what gives his audience a reason to care. Paul connects that one project to a pattern he’s seen across the industry. For investors, that’s capital earning nothing. For utilities, it’s power they could already be delivering, and for policymakers, it’s a bottleneck they have the authority to address. The story brought them in, and the zoom-out shows each of them where they fit.

Paul’s full depth of thinking is still there in every sentence. His readers just come in through a scenario instead of a long list.

Putting in the reps

A magical spell won't instantly break the curse, which is why we start all of our clients on LinkedIn. Each post is one idea tested in public, with immediate signals about what landed and what got lost. Over a few months the writing gets better, the ideas get sharper, and eventually the people reading start to hear the song you're tapping out on the table.

Once you see the "it's working" signals, that's when you add layers like a newsletter to go deeper, outbound to get leads, and thought leader ads for increased visibility. Start small, validate, then scale.

I hope if you're in that dark maze right now, this adds a little light to help you see the next step. We need more of your "everything connects" thinking out there, not less. So don't give up.

If you need helping getting out of the maze, here are 3 ways to work with me:

• Ask me to review and edit your LinkedIn profile
• Work with me 1:1 to connect your dots and find the stories that bring people into your work
• Have our team of humans manage your LinkedIn & Substack on retainer

Just reply here and I'll send you more info.

Now off to glue more stars on my son's costume...

Happy Halloween!

Brynne

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