People with exceptional memory and focus can hold complex reasoning internally without externalizing it. They grasp concepts quickly and move on. They build impressive things and we need them. But their internal reasoning remains inaccessible to others, and their quick comprehension leaves no map of the territory they crossed.

Meanwhile, those who struggle end up developing disciplines that benefit everyone around them. They must write things down to remember. They must ask “why” to understand. They must prioritize ruthlessly because they can’t hold everything at once. They produce artifacts others can learn from. They provide context others need. They make strategic decisions about what actually matters.

The limitation becomes the mechanism for contribution.

This generalized comparison might seem like a hyperbolic biased binary, but it’s a pattern too pervasive to ignore.

Externalization Creates Compound Value

A brilliant insight that lives only in someone’s head dies with them, or at best transfers imperfectly through conversation. Written reasoning compounds. It can be referenced, refined, and shared at scale.

The person with poor memory who writes everything down is inadvertently building a knowledge base that outlives any single conversation. They’re not just compensating for what might be seen as a deficit; they’re building something that scales beyond themselves.

Writing Forces Rigor That Memory Doesn’t

When you write something down, you discover the gaps in your reasoning. “I know this” becomes “wait, do I actually know this, or do I just feel like I know it?”

Memory can store conclusions without preserving the derivation. Writing demands you reconstruct (or construct for the first time) the actual argument.

This distinction matters more than it might seem. If you cannot articulate why, the how is lost with you, even before attempting to pass it to others. You might react correctly in familiar situations, but you can’t adapt when conditions change, and you certainly can’t teach anyone else to navigate novel circumstances.

Oral traditions had their merits. Stories, rituals, and apprenticeships preserved knowledge for millennia. But civilization could not have grown past primitive means into higher abstractions without basing those abstractions on written proofs and instructions. Mathematics, engineering, law, science: each discipline builds on derivations that must be examined, challenged, and extended. You cannot build a cathedral on “trust me, I know how arches work.”

The person with limited working memory who must slow down, test assumptions, and commit reasoning to a shared medium isn’t suffering a handicap. They’re being forced into the discipline that enables cumulative progress. They might struggle to be the star student at first. But over time, they maintain context in a form that compounds. They have a foundation to build on, and others can build on it too.

The Empathy Gap

Even when those with exceptional memory do write down their thoughts, they tend to have a disconnect with the audience. They can’t understand why others don’t understand what seems obvious to them.

Those who struggled have walked the path consciously. They know where the footholds are because they had to find them deliberately. They remember what it felt like to not understand, because that state was recent and real, not something they skipped past effortlessly years ago.

The curse of expertise, accelerated. Everyone eventually forgets what it was like to not know something. But for those with exceptional memory and quick comprehension, that forgetting happens almost instantly. They never dwelt in the confusion long enough to map its contours.

Sincere effort is visible. Readers and listeners can sense when someone has genuinely wrestled with material versus when they’re transmitting from a place of assumed understanding. The struggle leaves traces in the writing: the careful definitions, the anticipated objections, the worked examples. These aren’t decorations; they’re evidence of someone who knows where the hard parts are.

Of course, people with exceptional memory and focus can learn to communicate well. But very few do, and nearly all of them struggle with one thing: teaching as if the other person doesn’t already understand the subject.

So what’s the missing ingredient? It’s not speaking in simple terms. It’s context.

Context is what turns a “failing” math student into a leader in their classroom. Context takes a boring subject and breathes life into it, or rather, exposes the life that was already there. When you struggle to recall and focus, context and relationships become everything. You can’t hold isolated facts, so you learn to ask “why” and “how are these things related.” You build webs of meaning because you have to.

That habit of asking why and finding relationships turns out to be exactly what good teaching requires. The person who needed context to learn is the person who naturally provides context when they teach.

Understanding emerges from expansion compressed through teaching. The struggle forces both. You expand because you have to; you can’t skip research when things don’t click immediately. You compress because you must; writing things down and explaining to others is how you retain anything at all. What looks like a limitation is actually the discipline that makes learning stick and makes knowledge transferable.

This is also why traditional lecture-oriented education fails so many people. Some can memorize the chalkboard just fine, but the lesson ends where real-world needs begin. Context and a call to action will always trump theory in isolation. Learning happens through building, not watching. Some people can do both. Most can’t. So learn from the turtle.

Limited Focus Forces Prioritization

There’s a parallel pattern with attention. Someone who has spent their life struggling to focus learns to prioritize ruthlessly and work in increments. They can’t afford to chase every interesting thread, so they develop the discipline to identify what matters most and pursue it first.

Someone who doesn’t struggle with focus or memory tends to build everything at once. They hold the entire system in their head, so they optimize locally across all components simultaneously. This produces impressive low-level work like elegant algorithms and clever optimizations, but often with an almost overconfident view of causality and scope. It’s easy for them to build intricate code and hard for them to focus on business objectives and team dynamics.

Both types of people are useful. But when it’s time to train and mentor others, you hope the “slow” person was the one taking notes and making high-level decisions. The person who couldn’t hold everything in their head had to decide what was worth holding. That constraint forced strategic thinking.

There’s another advantage to moving slowly: turtles produce less waste. Think of it like test-driven development, where you test assumptions before diving into days or weeks of busy work. The turtle measures value and defines success criteria before building. They know when to take more notes, when to present reasoning to the group, and when to stop and validate before proceeding.

This is why architects and managers should strive to be turtles. Software developers should too, but they need a wise, slow turtle to learn from. The hare can write a lot of code very fast, but the turtle asks whether that code should exist at all.

Are managers always the best at doing the jobs they were promoted from? Often, no. But the good ones bring clarity and unity. They translate between people who think differently. They provide the context that lets individual brilliance become collective progress. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the work that makes everything else possible.

Seek Hardship and Take Notes

The struggle to remember creates the written artifact. The struggle to understand creates the contextual web. The struggle to focus creates the strategic filter. Each constraint enforces a discipline that produces something others can use. Those who didn’t struggle don’t produce these things, not because they’re incapable, but because they never needed to. Their strength let them skip the process that generates the byproduct.

So if you’ve spent your life feeling slower than others, needing more time, writing everything down, asking “why” when others seemed to just know, recognize what you’ve been building. Not despite the struggle, but through it.

You don’t need to be the genius in the room. You don’t need to be the one with the first brilliant proposition. Be the turtle, not the hare. See the big picture. Recognize the gifts everyone around you brings, and use your hard-won focus and discipline to bring it all together.

Those who struggle to understand become those who help others understand.