19.05.2023 **Tags** #areas/learning # Feynman Technique ## A nice video explaining the Feynman Technique [Week 32 - How to Learn Really Hard Subjects](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNv8asxZc6U) [Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrNqSLPaZLc) ## 1.Choose a concept you want to learn about Identify a topic, take out a blank sheet of paper. Write out everything you know about the subject you want to understand as if you were teaching it to a child. ## 2. Explain it to a 12 year old Now that you think you understand a topic reasonably well, explain it to a 12-year-old. Use your sheet as a reference and try to remove any jargon or complexity. Only use simple words. Only use words a child would understand. Jargon hides our lack of understanding. When forced to write out an idea from start to finish in simple language, you discover where you struggle … where it doesn’t quite make sense … where you get frustrated … where you don’t really understand as well as you thought. Only by identifying gaps in your knowledge can you fill them. ## 3. Reflect, Refine, and Simplify Only when you can explain the subject in simple terms do you understand it. Review your notes to make sure you didn’t mistakenly borrow any jargon or gloss over anything complicated. Read it out loud as if to a child. If the explanation isn’t simple enough or sounds confusing, that’s a good indication that you need to reflect and refine. Go back to the source material, reviewing the parts you don’t quite understand yet. Repeat until you have a simple explanation. ## 4. Organize and Review To test your understanding in the real world, run it by someone else. How effective was your explanation? What questions did they ask? What parts did they get confused about? When you’re happy with your understanding, take the page you created with a simple explanation and put it into the knowledge base. # References https://www.youtube.com/@TheMITChallenge (Scott Young)