Information is learned when you can explain it and use it in a wide variety of situations.
The Feynman Technique is the best way to supercharge your learning. And it works no matter the subject. Devised by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.
Learning doesn’t happen from skimming through a book or remembering enough to pass a test. Information is learned when you can explain it and use it in a wide variety of situations.
There are four steps to the Feynman Learning Technique. The steps are as follows:
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Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
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Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
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Organize and simplify.
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Transmit (optional).
Step 1: Pretend to teach it to a child
Take out a blank sheet of paper. At the top, write the subject you want to master. Now write out everything you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child or a rubber duck sitting on your desk.
It’s important to remember that you are not teaching to your smart adult friend, but rather a child who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships. It has to be simple and clear. There is nowhere to hide in obfuscation.
Or, for a different angle on the Feynman Technique, you could place a rubber duck on your desk and try explaining the concept to it. Software engineers sometimes tackle debugging by explaining their code, line by line, to a rubber duck. It sounds silly, but it’s a forcing function to make you walk through your thinking as simply as possible.
It turns out that one of the ways we mask our lack of understanding is by using complicated vocabulary and jargon. The truth is, if you can’t clearly and simply define the words and terms you are using, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If you look at a painting and describe it as “abstract