As also "that guy that people go to for git help", I've seen people clearly surprised that: - cherry-pick creates "duplicated" commits - you can checkout a co

As also "that guy that people go to for git help", I've seen people clearly surprised that: - cherry-pick creates "duplicated" commits - you can checkout a commit, rather than a branch - two commits in the same repo may be topologically unrelated to each other - merge commit can contain changes unrelated to its parents (usually after making some by accident) - you can git reset --soft Those are just the ones that came to my head on a whim (and don't get me started on rebase-heavy workflows). I've had people telling me that it "finally clicked" when made aware that commit is a state rather than a change. Explaining what I just did to "fix" someone's repo is also often easier after a proper "commit as a snapshot" prelude. If people who used Git for years say "oh, that makes much more sense now" after being presented with basic Git concepts, it suggests that their mental model may have been somewhat flawed. Once you internalize that commit is a snapshot, going from that to thinking about diffs between two commits is easy. The other way around is not so obvious - when checking out a commit from complicated topology, it may not be immediately clear how to get from one state to another by "applying diffs" even if it's technically equivalent, so simple operations will end up seeming like undecipherable magic to you simply because they don't fit your mental model very well.