The "explain it to a 6-year-old" test is simple: if you can break your expertise down into terms a child could follow, you've actually mastered the subject. If you can't do that without leaning on jargon, that's a sign you haven't studied it deeply enough — not a sign the topic is too complex to simplify.
What the test is and where it comes from
The line comes straight from how we brief clients before a shoot: when you can explain your concept to a six-year-old, you know that you know it well.
It's a filter, not a gimmick. Most experts assume complexity is proof of expertise — the more technical the language, the smarter they sound. The test flips that assumption. Anyone can memorize technical vocabulary. Explaining the same idea in plain language, without losing the substance, requires actually understanding how the pieces fit together.
This is a well-known idea outside of content strategy too — it's often attributed to physicists and teachers who say you don't really understand a concept until you can explain it without the specialized vocabulary that surrounds it. We apply the same logic to on-camera content, because the audience for a piece of expert content is almost never other experts. It's people trying to decide whether to trust you, and they judge that decision on whether they understood you, not on whether you sounded credentialed.
Why needing jargon is a sign you haven't mastered the material
People who take the support of technical jargon and economize their craft that way — they usually have a lot left to study.
Jargon isn't inherently bad; every field needs precise terms among practitioners. The problem is using jargon as a shortcut in front of an audience that doesn't share your vocabulary. If a concept only makes sense wrapped in field-specific language, you likely haven't broken it down into its real components yet — you've only memorized the label for it.
This matters more for content than it does in a classroom, because on camera you don't get a follow-up question. If the six-year-old version doesn't exist in your head, the viewer scrolls past before you finish the sentence.
How it connects to the 15-videos-in-one-hour production math
This test isn't an abstract philosophy — it's load-bearing for how fast content actually gets made. We regularly film 15 videos in one hour without scripts, which breaks down to about four minutes per video, including prep, shoot, and direction. Some clips take as little as 90 seconds.
That pace is only possible because the expert already knows the material well enough to explain it simply, on the spot, without a script to lean on. Experts who need dense, technical framing take longer to shoot, because they're translating in real time instead of just talking. The math behind 15 videos in one hour depends entirely on speakers who've already passed the six-year-old test in their own heads.
We use it, in effect, as a diagnostic during the practice session, before the camera is even involved. If an expert reaches for jargon while explaining something to us, that's the signal to dig one layer deeper before shoot day — not to write a script around the jargon, but to find the plain-language version underneath it. Once that version exists, the four-minute-per-video pace becomes realistic, because there's nothing left to figure out live in front of the camera.
Applying the test before you ever hit record
You don't need a studio to run this test. Before your next shoot — or your next attempt to explain your work to a prospective client — try explaining the concept out loud to yourself as if the listener has zero background in your field.
A few markers that you've passed:
- You can explain the "why it matters" in one sentence, not three.
- You're not reaching for an acronym or a term of art to carry the point.
- The explanation still holds up if you strip out every credential-signaling word.
If you catch yourself needing complexity to get through the explanation, that's useful information — it tells you exactly where to study more, not where to write a denser script.
Examples of jargon-heavy vs. six-year-old-simple explanations
Jargon-heavy: "We leverage a multi-modal capture pipeline to optimize for authority-driven engagement metrics across the funnel."
Six-year-old-simple: "We film you once and turn that footage into months of content, so you don't have to think about posting every day."
The second version says less, technically, but it communicates more. That's the whole point of the test — clarity isn't the enemy of depth, it's proof of it.