Teach to Master
The fastest way to become an expert is to teach what you love.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 79%
Lori competed in fitness for almost five years without a first-place win. The year everything changed was the year she started running weekend camps teaching women how to pose, walk, and present on stage. The act of getting so granular about improving others forced her to embody the skill herself, and she swept two national titles never swept in the same year. Her rule: to really master something, teach it — teaching makes you relearn everything and become a better expert than practicing alone ever could.
Origin
After nearly five years of competing without winning, Lori began teaching stage presence and posing at Sunday camps. That year of intense teaching coincided with her sweeping two national fitness titles.
Core principles
- 01Teaching forces you to relearn and deepen what you already know.
- 02Getting granular enough to improve others improves you.
- 03You embody a skill when you teach it, not just when you practice it.
How to run it
- 1
Choose a subject you love
Teach in a domain you already practice and care about, so the deepening compounds your existing strength.
- 2
Commit to teaching others regularly
Set up a recurring venue — a camp, a course, a group — where you have to explain and demonstrate the skill.
Pro tip Recurring commitments (like Lori's Sunday camps) force the reps that produce mastery.
- 3
Get granular improving each learner
Zoom into the fine details of each person's execution; the precision required to fix others rewrites your own understanding.
In the wild
After years without a win, Lori started teaching women how to pose and walk on stage at weekend camps, getting extremely granular to improve them.
→ That year she swept two national fitness titles that had never been swept in the same year, attributing the leap to the teaching.
Common mistakes
Relying on solo practice to level up
Practicing alone rarely exposes the blind spots that teaching forces you to confront and resolve.
Is it for you?
Best for
Practitioners who want to jump from competent to genuine expert in a domain they already care about.
Not ideal for
Absolute beginners with no working foundation to teach from yet.
From the transcript
“The observation of others and getting so granular to the point of wanting to improve them so much that you improve.”
“If you really want to learn, you'll start to teach what you like on the subject that you love.”
From the episode
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Lori Harder