Two Steps Ahead
This morning I sat with a cloud training.
I have taken trainings like this twenty times in my years as a data engineer. The kind of training where someone with deep expertise walks you through a console, naming services, explaining what bucket of magic does what trick. I was paying attention to learn. Somewhere in the second hour, mid-click, I caught myself thinking: I could translate this for someone who has never seen a terminal in her life. The trainer was not bad. The trainer was so far past the beginner’s friction that they no longer remembered what the friction felt like. The vocabulary itself had become a wall. The steps the trainer called trivial were the steps I had spent half an hour stuck on in earlier years, before the path was worn into me.
The thought was small. Maybe ten seconds. But the recognition stayed.
I thought of my son.
My son writes Linux guides for a living. He started writing them not as an expert but as someone who had just learned the thing himself — someone who had felt every place where the official documentation assumed knowledge he did not have, every place where a step the docs called straightforward took him three hours, every place where the path branched and nobody told him which branch to choose. He wrote each guide for the version of himself who had been stuck the day before. He solved each piece of friction once, for himself, and then he wrote down the solution. His clients pay him for the guides. They pay him because the friction is still fresh, the fix is still alive, and the writing comes from someone who can still remember what it felt like to not know.
He is not twenty steps ahead of his readers. He is two steps ahead. He is exactly far enough to be useful and exactly close enough to be trusted.
The close guide
This is the thing I have been circling for weeks without naming. The friction you have just felt is the friction your reader is feeling right now. The fix you have just found is the fix she cannot yet find on her own. The smallness of the distance between her place and yours is not a deficit. It is the asset. The closeness is what makes the teaching land.
I think we are taught the opposite. We are taught to wait to teach until we have arrived — until we have credentials, until we have ten years and a stage and a publisher and a title. We are taught that teaching is the privilege of those who have left the beginner behind. I no longer believe this. Teaching is the gift of those who can still remember what the beginner sees. And the only people who can still remember are the ones who recently were beginners themselves.
The entrepreneur Daniel Priestley names this on the Diary of a CEO (Priestley, 2025): you are already standing on a mountain of value, but you are too close to it to see it. The trap, he says, is looking up the slope at someone twenty steps ahead — the famous founder, the bestselling author, the keynote speaker — and concluding that the mountain you are standing on is not yet a mountain. It is. To the woman two steps behind you, your mountain is the mountain. To the woman twenty steps behind you, the celebrity twenty steps ahead is unreachable, and you are the close guide she can actually follow.
The amnesia of the solved
There is something the mind does that I have only recently learned to watch. As soon as we land on the solved side of a problem, we forget the unsolved side. Not partly. Completely. We do not just remember the difficulty less vividly — we dismiss it. The mind moves quickly into the ease of the present and lets the past discomfort drop. The five hours it took to figure out the configuration become, in retrospect, oh, you just do this and this and this. The years it took to understand a practice become oh, you just sit with it. The marriage conversation that broke us open for a week becomes, after the week, oh, you just talk honestly with your partner. The discomfort, which was the whole reality of the time before the fix, vanishes from the memory of the time after.
This is not malice. This is mercy. The mind clears the desk so we can keep walking. But it is also the precondition for losing the beginner. The very moment we are most able to help someone still in the difficulty is the moment we are also most tempted to wave at it as if it were nothing. Just do this. As if it were obvious. As if we had not, ourselves, the day before, sat with our heads in our hands.
The close guide is the one who refuses to let the amnesia close. Who writes the path down while the path is still warm. Who keeps a record of what it felt like at step three so that step three is still there for the next person.
What high altitude loses
When you climb too high, three things follow from this forgetting.
The first: you forget the names of the obstacles. You step over them now without thinking. They are no longer obstacles to you. So when a beginner says I am stuck here, you cannot quite see what she is stuck on, because for you the place is no longer a stuck place. It is invisible terrain. You wave her past it with the assurance of someone who does not remember what the wall felt like.
The second: your language drifts. You begin to speak the dialect of your new altitude. The words you use are the words other people at your altitude use. They are precise, they are efficient, and they are not the words the beginner uses. The vocabulary itself becomes a fence around the room you are teaching in. The beginner stands outside the fence, listening to a conversation she cannot enter.
The third — and this is the one I keep coming back to — you become less believable. Not less impressive. Less believable. The beginner reads work by someone twenty steps ahead and does not think I could do that. She thinks she is a different species. She closes the tab. She goes back to her life. The teaching does not convert because the example does not feel reachable.
The woman who reads Brené Brown does not become Brené Brown. She reads the book, admires the writer, sets the book down, and goes back to a Monday unchanged. Brené is too far. The distance is too great. The change the book describes feels like it belongs to someone who already had access to a stage Brené had access to.
But the woman who reads someone who began pivoting last year, who is still in the middle of the marriage and the day job and the mortgage and the children — that woman sets the essay down and thinks I could begin this week. The distance is small enough to cross.
The third position
For a long time I was afraid of two things at once.
I was afraid of being invisible. Of letting the iceberg of my profession melt under me without ever sending up a flare. Of staying small until small became gone.
And I was afraid of being visible in the wrong way. Of being seen as a woman who claims to know more than she does. Of performing a mastery I have not earned. Of being the woman my older sister long ago called egoist, in the voice that still lives in me whenever I lift my head above the others at the table.
What I missed for a long time is that both fears point to the same false choice. The choice was never between invisibility and elevation. There is a third position. There is the position of being seen at exactly the level where I actually stand — neither hiding nor performing, just showing up with what I have learned, freshly enough that the learning still smells of the day I learned it.
This is the position my son occupies in his Linux guides. He does not claim to be an expert. He claims to be someone who got stuck and got unstuck, and who wrote down the path between those two places. The claim is small. The usefulness is enormous. The egoist verdict cannot land on a claim that small. Nothing in the work is performing. The work is simply translation between two places he has actually stood.
I can occupy this position too.
The myth of climbing first
The story we are sold is that the route to becoming someone who teaches is to climb first. To leave. To master. To arrive at some upper plateau where the credentials are real and the title is unimpeachable. And then, generously, to descend — to come back to the people we left behind and share what we learned.
The story sounds humble. It sounds responsible. It sounds like the right order of things.
It is the wrong order.
By the time you have climbed twenty steps and come back down, you no longer remember what step three felt like. You wave generally at the lower terrain. You speak in compressed wisdom that no longer captures the texture of the place. Your descent is the descent of a tourist, not a guide. You can describe the view from the top but you cannot describe the path, because the path is now a thing you walked once, a long time ago, and the detail has fallen out of memory. The amnesia of the solved has done its quiet work in the years between, and what you bring back is generalized, beautiful, and not quite useful to anyone still standing where you used to stand.
The person who can describe the path is the person who is still on it. The teacher you can actually follow is the teacher who is still close enough to remember each turning, each false branch, each moment when the right thing to do was not obvious. You do not need to climb and come back. You need to teach from where you are now — two steps ahead, while two steps ahead is still a place you can describe in living detail.
To become a person of influence does not require leaving your stage. It requires noticing that the stage you are on is exactly the right stage to teach from. The thing the inner voice calls not enough yet is the thing that makes the teaching land. The unfinishedness is the credential. The fact that you are still mid-pivot is what makes the woman mid-thinking-about-pivot able to trust you. Were you already arrived, she could not reach you. Because you are not, she can.
There is no debt to repay by climbing first. There is no permission to wait for. The work begins from the foot’s current planting — while the planting is still fresh, while the friction is still readable, while the fix is still alive enough to translate.
Where I actually stand
So let me name where I actually stand, without performing more than is true.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who suspects her job is dying but has not yet let herself say it out loud.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who has been practicing privately for years — meditation, journalling, fasting, prayer, body work, breath work, whatever shape it took — and who has never connected the practice to anything that might earn her income or recognition or a public form.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who is afraid her husband will leave if she pivots, and who has not yet asked him directly.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who knows in her body that something is off about the way she is living, and who does not yet have language for what the body is saying.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who has been told her whole life she is too much, and who has built a life around being less.
I am two steps ahead of the woman who reads the AI headlines and feels the iceberg tilt under her feet and does not yet know whether to grab the iceberg harder or step off it.
I am not twenty steps ahead of any of these women. I am two. I am exactly far enough to be useful and exactly close enough to be trusted. The years of practice are still readable in my voice — they have not yet drifted into the dialect of a higher altitude. The fear is still readable too. The fix I have found is still fresh enough to translate.
The mountain I am standing on
Tonight I will sit at the desk and translate a piece of the cloud training I took this morning into language a woman who has never opened a terminal can follow. Not because the cloud is the work — the cloud is not the work — but because the practice of translating from where I just stood into language a beginner can use is the practice that will carry every piece of the work I am building.
The friction I felt this morning will be in the writing. The fix I found will be in the writing. The distance between us — between me and the woman who reads it — will be exactly small enough to cross.
This is the mountain I am standing on. I do not need a bigger one.
Bibliography
Priestley, D. (2014). Key Person of Influence: The 5-Step Method to Become One of the Most Highly Valued and Highly Paid People in Your Industry. Rethink Press. ISBN 978-1781331033. Available: Rethink Press.
Priestley, D. (2025, January 20). The Money Making Expert: The 7,11,4 Hack That Turns $1 Into $10K Per Month! [Podcast interview by S. Bartlett]. The Diary Of A CEO. Available: YouTube.