Have you ever looked at one of your employees and thought, how the hell do they not know this? So you've explained it, it seems obvious, it's common sense, right? At least it's obvious to you. But here's the problem. You've probably been doing this for 10, 15, maybe 20 years. You've made the mistakes, you've dealt with the customers, you've screwed up the jobs, you've learned what works and what doesn't. And eventually you get so experienced that you forget what it's like to not know. That's called the curse of knowledge. And in this episode, I'm going to unpack what this means and why it keeps you so frustrated. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Brad Hebner, and I'm a licensed general contractor, author of the Contract Your Profit Blueprint, and business coach to overwhelmed and stuck contractors who want to boost their profits and regain their freedom. And I do that by showing them how to charge what they're worth. So, what is the curse of knowledge? Let's unpack this and really dig into it because this is the single biggest reason why so many contractors are so frustrated all the time when it comes to your team members and hiring people, even subs for that matter. This is the number one reason why we stay stuck and we're frustrated all the time. I used to come home from work every day and uh, you know, air my grievances with my wife at the dinner table, and she would get so frustrated, she finally just like told me, Hey, stop, I don't want to hear about your business anymore. Because I was so frustrated all the time. I would say something, you know, uh John did something so stupid today, did this, this, this, and this, and man, it's just it's so frustrating. And she would say, Yeah, but uh, but did you tell him? Did you show him how to do it? And I'm like, No, I didn't, I didn't tell him, it's common sense. And she would say, But you didn't show him, yeah, you didn't tell him. And eventually, I mean, she was right from the very beginning, but eventually I finally realized, like, oh, yeah, maybe you're on to something there, dear. So what is the curse of the curse of knowledge? So whenever you've done something for so long, you it it seems inherently natural to you, right? It seems like it's something that it's just naturally acquired, but in reality it's not. Okay, there's a there's a famous Stanford experiment that was done back in 1990 where people were asked to tap out familiar songs on their table. They would have two groups of students. So they would have one group that was tapping, and they would have one group that was listening. And so they would, you know, they would just tap out like a pencil or finger on the table, they would tap out a tune, whether it's like jingle bell or merry Christmas or you know, uh Mary had a little animal, whatever, just tap it out. And it seems pretty obvious like as you're tapping, people would be able to understand the rhythm. Right? The problem is that there's no there's no variance of sound, it's just monotone, right? So here's what's crazy about this experiment. The people tapping thought the listener would correctly identify the song about 50% of the time. So, you know, about half of the songs they would be able to identify. You know what the actual number of people, the the percentage that was identified? 2.5 percent. 2.5% of the songs were identified. Why? Because the tapper could hear the song playing in their head, the melody, the the sounds, the notes, while they were tapping, right? The listener just heard tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And so what's happening in your mind and in your business for that matter is that you walk onto the job and immediately notice something doesn't look right, right? There's an access problem, production is going to take longer than what you thought, something was missed in the estimate, the customer might be difficult, something needs to happen before the next step. And your employees may not see any of that. Why? Because they weren't there for the estimate, they weren't there when you were doing the sales, they weren't there when you were putting the estimate together, right? They weren't there for any of it. So as you're putting together this estimate and this timeline and the whole thing, and you're building it in your head visually, you can see what it looks like. Your employees and your subs have they're not pervy to that conversation. They're walking in blind to the information that you've given them, right? So your employees don't see any of it, and it's not because they're stupid, although sometimes we think they are. And I mean, to be fair, sometimes we do hire stupid employees. But the thing is that you have thousands of repetitions and they don't, right? They don't have that. So experience does matter. Experience creates instincts, which is what we label as quote common sense. And I've said this before, there's no such thing as common common sense. Now we use that term in society. Oh, it's common sense. Right, I get that. But it's not common sense. It really, it really, really, really, really isn't. Maybe I'll throw a couple more really in there. It's not common sense. What what we're talking about and what we're thinking of is common experience. Just because I hire a carpenter that has 30 years experience doesn't mean it's the same experience that I have. They may have been taught how to do something one specific way in terms of how they do it, you know, do their the their skill. And you were taught a totally different way growing up by a different person. You think your way is right, they think their way is right. The reality of it is that you guys don't know a different way of doing it. So who's right in this? Well, you're the owner, so you probably want it done your way, because that's the way you've always done it, right? But they they don't know that. And so, you know, we find ourselves saying they should have known that. I mean, these guys should have known this. They know better. I've told them, I've showed them, they know better. They're just being lazy, right? But ask yourself this. How would they have known? Like even if you've told them one time, how would they have known, right? The first question you should always ask is how would they have known? Or as my wife would say, Did you show them? Did you tell them? Yeah, but did you tell them? Yeah, I told them. Told them one time while we were driving down the road and they weren't even paying attention, right? This I've I've told this story before where you know we would show up for day one of the job, I would get everybody together, and uh, I'm just going, I'm just doing like a 30,000 foot overview. I'm not like going into details about everything we're doing. I'm just kind of going over a the general scope with the customer and my lead guy or the or my employees that were there. And I would just be asking them or telling them, like, okay, guys, here's what we're doing here. We're doing a full gut, you know, and part of this is to like make sure the customer, you know, is on page with what we're doing, because if something doesn't sound right, that's when we want to talk about it. But I'm going over, like, okay, here's what we're doing. We're gonna demo the whole bathroom. Uh, we're gonna take out this shower, or I'm sorry, we're gonna take out this tub and we're gonna convert it into a walk-in shower. We're moving this and doing this, and we're doing a blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would like kind of, you know, real quickly go over the whole scope. I'm not doing it to like because I want them to know what we're doing. I'm just going over. But what would happen and what I found out is that as soon as I said, hey, we're gonna demo out this tub and turn it into a walk-in shower, their brain stopped listening to me and then went into, okay, what do we have to do to take this out? Well, it's a cast iron tub, so we're gonna have to probably bust it up with a sledgehammer or cut it. And then how are we gonna get down the steps? Because it's a tiny, you know, hallway, it's heavy. They're like, they're already trying to think about how they're gonna remove the tub, and they don't hear anything else that was said. Even if I said, make sure, hey guys, make sure we do this, right? Even if I emphasize this, make sure we do this, they're not listening to me anymore. Their eyes are glazed over. And so, you know, by the time I would go over everything, it's like, hey, you guys understand, and they're like, Oh, oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're we're good, right? But they didn't hear anything, they heard the first thing and they tuned out. That happens all the time. So just because you tell your people one time how to do something doesn't mean they've retained it. And again, you've done that thing 4,000 times. It's second nature to you. The part that you're missing is how long it takes to learn. You're removing the time it takes to learn and retain information. So we gotta stop expecting people to like just read our mind whenever we're throwing out bunches of information, right? So the curse of knowledge shows up everywhere in leadership. You tell somebody, hey, keep the job site clean. Common sense, right? Clean it. Okay, what does that mean? Like what's clean by your standard, right? Does your employee do they know like uh you know how you want it clean? Do they know what it looks like to be clean, right? So you have a picture in your head. Does the employee have the same picture, right? The same thing with like take initiative, communicate better, follow up with the customer, do a quality job, take ownership, pay attention to the details. These aren't standards, guys, these are ideas. Even though you say, hey, you know, we we're awesome because we you know we pay attention to the details, what the hell does that mean? Like, what does it mean? Pay attention to the details. You saying it doesn't define it, it's just an idea, right? So you have to define what that actually looks like. This is where the training and SOPs uh and expectations come from. So instead of you know, install the door, hey, go out to the Smith job and install the door, you have to teach what good looks like, right? What's the important steps, the common mistakes, why they ch why those steps matter, and when should they ask for help? So instead of follow up with the lead, it should you should define when, how, how often, what gets documented, and when you're done following up. And don't assume showing somebody something once means that they've retained it, even if they tell you got it. Why? Because people don't want you to think that they're stupid and don't understand it. And if you're the type of person that you know, just expects everyone to retain stuff on the first time, then you're training them like don't have excuses. Like if you're not, if you don't retain this on the first time, then you're not a good employee and want to get rid of you. That's how you're training them. So what do they do? They lie to you. Yeah, I got it. And then secretly after you leave, they're trying to figure it out and they waste a waste a bunch of time. I mean, just waste, waste, waste time because they're trying to, you know, Google it, ask AI, watch YouTube, but trying to figure it out without asking you because they're afraid to tell you they didn't get it the first time. Because your expectation is that you should be able to do it the first time. They've done it once, guys, and you've done it 4,000 times. Tell me how that equates the how those two equal each other. So knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach someone how to do it are completely different skills. And although some of you may be very good at delegating, you're absolutely horrible at teaching people because you have the common sense teaching methodology. This is where a lot of guys get in trouble. I mean, hey, I hired a subcontractor to come in and do this job, and when I showed up to check on him, he did like the wrong thing. He screwed, totally screwed it up. You know, my subs are incompetent. Guys, that's your fault. That's a hundred percent your fault because you didn't make sure they understood what was being done. You didn't make sure that you understood or that they understood what done looks like, what the standard is. You just hired a tile guy to quote do tile and you assume that they knew what that meant. No, you have to make sure the standards are there and you have to teach them what the outcome looks like. The simplest way to do it, right? Going back to the, you know, like the is the job site clean or not, how do you solve that? Well, you simply take a picture of a clean job site, right? Say you do a bathroom remodel, the job, the day is over, and you go and you like, you know, you don't like vacuum up everything, but you sweep up the floor, and then you put all the tools over in the corner so they have a nice little walkway, there's nothing in the way. And once it's the way you want it, you take pictures of what it looks like, and then you have it in your training modules or in your SOPs where it's like this is the standard for what a clean job site looks like before you go home at the end of the day. This is what it looks like. Having a picture of what it looks like is a hundred times better than you saying, well, you know, just sweep it up. It doesn't have to be perfectly swept up, just sweep up the big chunks and then put all the tools in the corner. Again, in your mind, you've swept up pretty much, you know, if one to ten is a scale, ten meaning it's perfectly swept up, there's no dust, and zero is it's you know, it's there's a bunch of dust. In your mind, you're thinking of like an eight or a nine. Like there's almost no debris on the ground. But you said, quote, pick up the big things, sweep up the big things. So what do they do, what do they deliver, or what are they thinking? They're thinking like a four or a five. So there's still dust and stuff on the ground. Because you're not speaking the same language. You're speaking 4,000 rep language, they're hearing one-time language. That's not the same. So you take a picture and you say, This is the standard.
