Best way to Learn is by Teaching
I’ve been taking advantage of you all… with the Feynman Technique.
Using you to learn about myself and my interests; sorry, not sorry.
Before I come clean, let me introduce you to Professor Richard Feynman.
Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who made contributions in fields such as quantum mechanics and particle physics. He was a pioneer of quantum computing and introduced the concept of nanotechnology. He taught at Cornell and Caltech.
Interestingly he thought of himself as merely “an ordinary person who studied hard”.
“There’s no miracle people. It just happens they got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff. There’s just people.” — Richard Feynman
He had a special technique that made him the renowned figure he is considered today.
The Feynman Technique
- Choose a concept to learn. Select a topic you’ve been interested in learning about and write it at the top of an empty page/doc
- Teach it to yourself or someone else. Write everything you currently know about the topic out as if you were explaining it to yourself. Or you can actually teach it to someone else.
- Return to the source material if you get stuck. Circle back to however you’re learning this topic — a book, notes, podcast — and fill the gaps in your knowledge.
- Simplify your explanations and create analogies. Lay out your notes and explanations, further clarifying the topic until it seems obvious. Additionally, think of analogies that feel intuitive.
Endeavor to be able to teach it to a:
- 4 year old
- 1st grader
- 5th grader
- 8th grader
- 12th grader
- Uninformed adult
- Freshman in College.
“I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” — Richard Feynman
Coming Clean
I’ve been using my writings to document my lessons & learning over the past year; I only kept going because of you.
It is only because you guys kept sending me messages about my blogs, that I kept on writing and learning.
There were times I only looked for the lesson in a situation, to write about it.
Every time I wrote only because there was a lesson learned that I wanted to extrapolate and truly internalize.
Elaboration & Message for you to take
I’m overreacting. There were many times I wrote a piece because I was bored, annoyed, confused, or genuinely wanted to share something with yall (99% of the time it’s this).
Writing is the most incredible way to expand on compressed & suppressed thoughts.
With social media or primary means of communication are pictures, comments, short insults, and NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE.
If you want to be a person of substance, you must create something or at least share something that was already created.
Impact Driven
The reason I won’t stop writing is because it won’t stop serving me.
I learn every time I write.
I learn every time I read.
I sometimes learn when I watch videos.
I rarely learn when I listen to podcasts/audiobooks.
