What goes wrong when you ignore that purpose through teaching your craft?

The most common reason fails: Believing that teaching is a distraction from "real" creative work — that time spent explaining your craft to others is time stolen from practicing it. This belief treats creative knowledge as a fixed quantity that you either spend on your own work or give away to students, as if teaching subtracts from your capacity rather than expanding it. People who hold this belief often cite the aphorism "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" without recognizing that it describes a failure of imagination, not a law of creative practice. The practitioners who refuse to teach often plateau precisely because they never develop the explicit understanding that teaching demands. They remain competent but unreflective — skilled hands guided by a mind that has stopped examining itself.

The fix: Choose one skill from your creative practice that you perform well but have never formally explained to another person. Write a 500-word teaching document — not notes, not bullet points, but a coherent explanation that would allow a competent beginner to understand why the skill works, not just how to perform it. As you write, notice where your understanding is crisp and where it dissolves into "I just know." Those dissolution points are your tacit knowledge boundaries — the places where teaching will force you to develop explicit understanding you do not yet possess. After writing, identify three assumptions embedded in your explanation that you have never tested. These are the seeds of your next phase of creative growth, made visible only because you attempted to teach.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Sharing your creative knowledge extends your impact beyond your own work.