The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand

Introduction

For most of my life (especially in school), I struggled to grasp some of the subjects I was supposed to be learning. Although I grasped subjects such as science and history fairly easily, topics such as math and accounting consistently proved to be challenging. In my mind, these subjects were made up of thousands of rules that I had to memorize to solve the associated problems. The ideas seemed to float around in my head without any foundation or place.

As so many students who struggle do, I felt inadequate at the time, as if my brain was not wired for solving these problems. I became a person who said “I'm not good at math” and avoided anything related to it. The notion of trying to memorize rule after rule frustrated me, and I wondered how others did it with such apparent ease. Were they simply more skilled at memorization? What was I missing?

At the same time, however, I knew I was a capable student. Along with science and history, writing came easily to me. But as much as I wanted math and subjects like it to work for me, it seemed like the light bulb never went on.

However, I learned to work with this apparent limitation throughout my years of education. I eventually earned a graduate degree in health administration and moved to Seattle, where I currently live. It was during this phase of my career that I identified the underlying cause of my struggle with subjects like math and started to see how the same problem affected others. When I looked back, it seemed ...