The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything

Learning 

 

 

There are two types of knowledge and most of us focus on the wrong one.

Farnam Street

• Shane Parrish

 

There are four simple steps to the Feynman Technique, which I’ll explain below:

1. Choose a Concept
2. Teach it to a Toddler
3. Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
4. Review and Simplify (optional)

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If you’re not learning you’re standing still. So what’s the best way to learn new subjects and identify gaps in our existing knowledge?

Two Types of Knowledge

There are two types of knowledge and most of us focus on the wrong one. The first type of knowledge focuses on knowing the name of something. The second focuses on knowing something. These are not the same thing. The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success. In fact, he created a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.

It’s called the Feynman Technique and it will help you learn anything faster and with greater understanding. Best of all, it’s incredibly easy to implement.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

— Mortimer Adler

There are four steps to the Feynman Technique.

Step 1: Teach it to a child

Take out a blank sheet of paper and write the subject you want to learn at the top. Write out what you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child. Not your smart adult friend but rather an 8-year-old who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships.

A lot of people tend to use complicated vocabulary and jargon to mask when they don’t understand something. The problem is we only fool ourselves because we don’t know that we don’t understand. In addition, using jargon conceals our misunderstanding from those around us.

When you write out an idea from start to finish in simple language that a child can understand (tip: use only the most common words), you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and simplify relationships and connections between ideas. If you struggle, you have a clear understanding of where you have some gaps. That tension is good –it heralds an opportunity to learn.

Step 2: Review

In step one, you will inevitably encounter gaps in your knowledge where you’re forgetting something important, are not able to explain it, or simply have trouble connecting an important concept.
This is invaluable feedback because you’ve discovered the edge of your knowledge. Competence is knowing the limit of your abilities, and you’ve just identified one!
This is where the learning starts. Now you know where you got stuck, go back to the source material and re-learn it until you can explain it in basic terms.
Identifying the boundaries of your understanding also limits the mistakes you’re liable to make and increases your chance of success when applying knowledge.

Step 3: Organize and Simplify

Now you have a set of hand-crafted notes. Review them to make sure you didn’t mistakenly borrow any of the jargon from the source material. Organize them into a simple story that flows.
Read them out loud. If the explanation isn’t simple or sounds confusing that’s a good indication that your understanding in that area still needs some work.

Step 4 (optional): Transmit

If you really want to be sure of your understanding, run it past someone (ideally who knows little of the subject –or find that 8-year-old!). The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another.

***

Not only is this a wonderful recipe for learning but it’s also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up. (Elon Musk calls this thinking from first principles.) This leads to a much deeper understanding of the ideas and concepts. Importantly, approaching problems in this way allows you to understand when others don’t know what they are talking about.

Feynman’s approach intuitively believes that intelligence is a process of growth, which dovetails nicely with the work of Carol Dweck, who beautifully describes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset.

2 Secrets to Learning Anything Faster: Lessons From Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman

Learning Effectively and Efficiently

The journey through life never stops, until we die. We are constantly learning and using new beliefs, principles, habits, and systems — consciously and unconsciously to improve our lives.

Deliberate learning accelerates the learning process. When you choose what to focus on instead of unconsciously picking up life skills as grow, you can expedite the learning process.

Besides helping to bolster your career, learning a new skill, a better productive system, a new technology, a foreign language, or an advanced skill can help you take full control of your life and where it’s heading. Now, more than ever, it pays to adopt the mindset of a life-long learner.

Your ability to learn better and faster can improve your prospects in life. Learning anything faster can give your a greater edge in career and make you more competitive. Your effort and dedication to learning can also expand your intelligence.

If you are aiming to master anything quickly, you can learn from Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman — two of the world’s most influential physicists. They offer practical advice you can use to accelerate your learning.

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Albert Einstein: Learn to Enjoy the Learning Process

Einstein’s discoveries revolutionised our understanding of the universe. According to Einstein, improving your intellectual capacity should be fun and enjoyable — happy learners are quick learners.

In 1915, after completing a two-page masterpiece that catapulted him into historical glory —the theory of general relativity, he wrote a letter to his 11-year-old son (Hans Albert) who was learning the piano and said:

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal…

The idea of enjoying what you learn can be hard to grasp, especially when you are trying to master a difficult subject. But it shouldn’t be so hard to learn and have fun at the same time.

To learn anything faster or better, choose topics you will enjoy — if you have control over what you are learning. Make the learning relevant. You should be able to answer the question “Why Am I learning this?” at any point.

If you have to learn something as a requirement to accelerate your career, use strategies that can make the process enjoyable. Example, if learning to code is doesn’t feel like fun, use the process to build something you care about.

You could also connect your actions with progress — track your progress and visualise it. Progress itself is inherently rewarding. You can also create an environment that can help you find flow:

“the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”

During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment and a total involvement with life. The more you can enjoy what you are learning, the faster you’re likely to master it.

Einstein might have changed our perception of the universe but remember that he did it by enjoying his work and finding flow in the process. So, next time you choose to learn anything, find a fun way to learn it.

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Richard Feynman Technique: Teach Others

Known as the “Great Explainer,” Richard Feynman was revered for his ability to explain complex and dense topics like quantum physics to virtually anybody in simple and intuitive ways. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman always wanted to know more, to learn more. He once said, “I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”

His approach to accelerating learning (The Feynman Technique) — explaining or teaching what you learn to others can help you learn better and retain more of what you learn. The Feynman Technique is laid out in James Gleick’s biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Brain Pickings quotes his biographer James Gleich:

“He favoured no skill above any other, he taught himself how to play drums, to give massages, to tell stories, to pick up women in bars, considering all these to be crafts with learnable rules…”

According to Feynman, the true hallmark of genius is the ability to explain things simply — so simple, in fact, that you could explain it to an eight-year-old.

Einstein agrees. He once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

For thousands of years, people have known that the best way to understand a concept is to explain it to someone else. “While we teach, we learn,” said the Roman philosopher Seneca.

According to research, learners retain a greater percentage of what they learn when they explain/teach the concept to someone else, or use it immediately.

Your ideas will never be more effective than your ability to make others grasp them. When you share, you remember better. It challenges your understanding and forces you to think better.

So, if nothing else, teach others for your own sake. Whatever you choose to learn, you could teach others by starting a blog, a podcast or a video channel. You’ll reap the benefits in your own learning progress.

“Not only is the Feynman Technique a wonderful recipe for learning, but it’s also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up,” writes Shane Parish.

You may not be a scientist but Feynman’s approach to learning is useful and applicable in anything we want to learn. Teaching others what you learn is one of the fastest ways to acquire and retain knowledge. The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to transfer it to another.

If you want to master even the simplest skills, ideas and topics, learn to enjoy the process of learning and whilst you are having fun, make time to teach others what you know.

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Mind Cafe

Relaxed, inspiring essays about happiness.

• Learning
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Written by

Thomas Oppong

Founder @AllTopStartups | Featured at Business Insider, Forbes, etc. I share practical tools for wealth, health, and happiness at https://postanly.substack.com

Mind Cafe

Relaxed, inspiring essays about happiness.

3 Rules To Spark Learning

It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of "pseudo-teaching" to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works. This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

 About the speaker Ramsey Musallam · Educator As a high school chemistry teacher, Ramsey Musallam expands curiosity in the classroom through multimedia and new technology.

Learning Is a Learned Behavior. Here’s How to Get Better at It

How To Learn

Pocket Worthy

·

Stories to fuel your mind.

Sure, getting better at something takes practice. But what does practice involve and how do we truly develop expertise?

Harvard Business Review |

• Ulrich Boser

Photo by cintascotch/Getty Images

Many people mistakenly believe that the ability to learn is a matter of intelligence. For them, learning is an immutable trait like eye color, simply luck of the genetic draw. People are born learners, or they’re not, the thinking goes. So why bother getting better at it? 

And that’s why many people tend to approach the topic of learning without much focus. They don’t think much about how they will develop an area of mastery. They use phrases like “practice makes perfect” without really considering the learning strategy at play. It’s a remarkably ill-defined expression, after all. Does practice mean repeating the same skill over and over again? Does practice require feedback? Should practice be hard? Or should it be fun?

A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better. 

Here’s one example of a study that shows how learning strategies can be more important than raw smarts when it comes to gaining expertise. Marcel Veenman has found that people who closely track their thinking will outscore others who have sky-high IQ levels when it comes to learning something new. His research suggests that in terms of developing mastery, focusing on how we understand is some 15 percentage points more important than innate intelligence. 

Here are three practical ways to build your learning skills, based on research. 

Organize Your Goals Effective learning often boils down to a type of project management. In order to develop an area of expertise, we first have to set achievable goals about what we want to learn. Then we have to develop strategies to help us reach those goals. 

A targeted approach to learning helps us cope with all the nagging feelings associated with gaining expertise: Am I good enough? Will I fail? What if I’m wrong? Isn’t there something else that I’d rather be doing?

While some self-carping is normal, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura says these sorts of negative emotions can quickly rob us of our ability to learn something new. Plus, we’re more committed if we develop a plan with clear objectives. The research is overwhelming on this point. Studies consistently show that people with clear goals outperform people with vague aspirations like “do a good job.” By setting targets, people can manage their feelings more easily and achieve progress with their learning

.

Think About Thinking Metacognition is crucial to the talent of learning. Psychologists define metacognition as “thinking about thinking,” and broadly speaking, metacognition is about being more inspective about how you know what you know. It’s a matter of asking ourselves questions like: Do I really get this idea? Could I explain it to a friend? What are my goals? Do I need more background knowledge? Or do I need more practice?

Metacognition comes easily to many trained experts. When a specialist works through an issue, they’ll often think a lot about how the problem is framed. They’ll often have a good sense of whether or not their answer seems reasonable. 

The key, it turns out, is not to leave this sort of “thinking about thinking” to the experts. When it comes to learning, one of the biggest issues is that people don’t engage in metacognition enough. They don’t stop to ask themselves if they really get a skill or concept. 

The issue, then, is not that something goes in one ear and out the other. The issue is that individuals don’t dwell on the dwelling. They don’t push themselves to really think about their thinking

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Reflect on Your Learning There is something of a contradiction in learning. It turns out that we need to let go of our learning in order to understand our learning. For example, when we step away from a problem, we often learn more about a problem. Get into a discussion with a colleague, for instance, and often your best arguments arrive while you’re washing the dishes later. Read a software manual and a good amount of your comprehension can come after you shut the pages. 

In short, learning benefits from reflection. This type of reflection requires a moment of calm. Maybe we’re quietly writing an essay in a corner — or talking to ourselves as we’re in the shower. But it usually takes a bit of cognitive quiet, a moment of silent introspection, for us to engage in any sort of focused deliberation. 

Sleep is a fascinating example of this idea. It’s possible that we tidy up our knowledge while we’re napping or sleeping deeply. One recent study shows a good evening of shut-eye can reduce practice time by 50%. 

The idea of cognitive quiet also helps explain why it’s so difficult to gain skills when we’re stressed or angry or lonely. When feelings surge through our brain, we can’t deliberate and reflect. Sure, in some sort of dramatic, high-stakes situations, we might be able to learn something basic like remember a phone number. But for us to gain any sort of understanding, there needs to be some state of mental ease. 

The good news from all of this — for individuals and for companies looking to help their employees be their best — is that learning is a learned behavior. Being a quick study doesn’t mean you’re the smartest person in the room. It’s that you’ve learned how to learn. By deliberately organizing your learning goals, thinking about your thinking, and reflecting on your learning at opportune times, you can become a better study, too. 

Ulrich Boser is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he also founded and runs the science of learning initiative. He’s the author of Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything.