Whether it was school, side readings, or coworkers, I was soaking up everything I could at the beginning of my career. Out of college, I used this background to help convince a very senior team to change some of our practices.

As I grew in respect / seniority, I was reviewing the work of other engineers more. I had gut feelings and vague descriptions of "beauty" and "ugly" to describe to others what I was wanting to see from their code. This was frustrating to the people I was reviewing and they were wanting to brush off my feedback because it wasn't concrete.

My problem was that I learned all of this for myself but I didn't consider how to capture it for me to teach others (mentoring hadn't even crossed my mind in college). Enough time had passed before teaching became important, that I had developed an intuition for applying what I learned remembering the language for it, the way to describe the motivation to help explain it to others.