The Feynman Technique
Or, the ultimate guide to learning anything
Happy Sunday!
Hope you are engaged in interesting activities during this lockdown. If you have picked up old hobbies, or if you are learning something new, do share with me.
Now it’s time for your weekly dose of multidisciplinary reading to upgrade your thinking and decision making skills. And if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.
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Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,500 words.
Q: What is the best way to learn something?
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
— Mortimer J. Adler (Philosopher)
Richard Feynman is known as The Great Explainer, and for good reason.
Unlike most scientists, he did not prefer to communicate via paper. Instead, he used verbal dialogue as the basis for the majority of his published work. In fact, if you read Surely You’re Joking, My. Feynman, it would feel like Feynman himself is narrating the story of his life in realtime. (That’s probably why the audiobook version is so so much fun to listen to. Give it a go, and don’t forget to thank me later.)
Apart from spoken communication, Feynman used cartoonish diagrams to explain highly scientific principles. He could easily tap into complex ideas using shapes, lines, and drawings. This method helped him strip away the jargon (more commonly known as ‘confusing language’), and permitted the power of storytelling to take precedence.
Feynman rejected rote memorisation, for obvious reasons. He believed that learning should be an active process of “trial and error, discovery and free inquiry.” He held that if you couldn’t explain something clearly in simple language, it was simply because you didn’t understand it well enough.
He understood the difference between knowing just the name of something and really knowing something, and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success, and of course, fame. Einstein is Einstein; but Feynman is Einstein with a big dollop of fun. I’d take Feynman any day!
In Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick writes:
In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganised his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject. When he was done he had a notebook of which he was especially proud.
How many of us ever had the time or even the inclination to do that?!
Often we don’t realise that we don’t understand something until it’s too late. When we’re asked to explain something, we start to blabber. When we’re asked to demonstrate our knowledge outside our own head, we realise we know a lot less than we thought we did. What a blow to the ego!
What made Richard Feynman The Great Explainer wasn’t just his innate intelligence (which was pretty impressive of course) but his systematic approach to identifying the things he didn’t know, and then throwing himself into understanding them inside-out. “Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions,” he once wrote.
The good thing though is that throughout his work and life, Feynman has provided insights into his process of tackling complex concepts in the world of physics and other subjects, and distilling his knowledge and ideas with elegance and simplicity.
His learning philosophy has famously come to be know as The Feynman Technique.
It’s a learning concept anyone can use to understand just about anything. This technique doesn’t let us fool ourselves into thinking we’re masters of a subject when we’re clearly not.
Each step of the process forces us to confront what we don’t know, engage directly with the material, clarify our understanding, and eventually build our circle of competence. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Choose a concept to learn
Selecting a concept to study compels you to be intentional about what you don’t know. It’s like opening up a notebook and writing down, “Things I Don’t Know About” — just like Feynman did. It’s advisable to write own exactly what you don’t know i.e., want to learn.
But don’t go overboard. Try to keep it small so that when you explain it to yourself, it can fit into a page. Aiming to learn everything about “Geology” or “Machine Learning” is not practical. Instead, focus on a smaller and more defined concept, Random forest for example.
Step 2: Teach it to yourself or better… someone else
Write or talk about everything you know of a topic or a concept as if you were explaining it to yourself. Even better, actually explain it to someone else.
Reading about a concept in a book or an article is not equivalent to learning; all of us know this but still kind of ignore. Taking notes is helpful, but to be honest, it is still not equivalent to learning. Whaaaat?!
True understanding involves teaching. Write a summary of what you’ve learnt in your own words. Make it interesting, fun, and give it a flair of your own.
Then… explain it to others. When they ask questions, you might find loopholes in your learning, and you’d have the rare opportunity to work on it, and this will only strengthen your understanding.
Most people don’t realise it, but teaching is the best way to learn.
If you understand something very well, you can explain it forward and backward, pointing out exceptions and spotting inconsistencies. You can explain it in your style, instead of copying somebody else’s.
This shows that you’ve got a solid foundation of the fundamentals. It also builds confidence and pushes you to tackle even more challenging subjects.
Step 3: Return to the source
When you tackle a hard topic, you’re bound to get stuck.
Explaining a newly learnt concept to somebody else, especially a child or anybody not familiar with the subject, is very unlikely to go smoothly. You’ll hit road bumps. You’ll discover there are few things you aren’t sure about.
This is a good time to go back to your notes and fill the gaps in your understanding. It might require further research and reading — especially when a child asks common sensical questions that you didn’t even consider. “What’s the point of quantum physics anyway?”
Children are awesome that way.
Learning something challenging takes several attempts, therefore in the Feynman Technique, returning to the source material is an explicit part of the learning process.
Rather than viewing learning as a one time thing, this step gives you the nudge to continuously refresh, reconsider, and relearn. Needless to say, the more you learn, the more your capacity to deepen your understanding in a subject increases.
When I first started studying about psychology, I had a hard time processing everything I was reading. The same happened this one time I got interested in studying economics. Writing about what I was learning, talking to others, pestering them with my ideas over the time have really helped me get a good grasp on the topics. I am far from where I want to be, but I can say I’ve come a long way, and the journey has been super super fun as well (which is important).
Step 4: Simplify further
Streamline your notes and explanations, further clarifying the topic until it seems obvious. Additionally, think of analogies that feel intuitive to make your explanations crystal clear.
Building analogies around the concept is usually a good rule of thumb to explain complex subjects. We all probably have “the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell” burned into our collective memories. Creating our own analogies whenever possible is not only a good way to learn, but a great way to teach as well. And it’s fun too!
It’s easy enough to commit terms to memory and then regurgitate them when prompted. It’s a good way to look smart. But memorisation is not understanding. Knowing jargon does not equal to knowing concepts.
Jargon is used to hide incompetence and gaps in learning. If we really want to learn something, we have to be able to distil what we truly know to its most basic form, also known as the fundamentals. This is where true understanding takes place.
The Feynman Technique is an excellent method to not only keep on learning new concepts, but also fill knowledge gaps, recall ideas, and study more efficiently.
Remember, Feynman used this very technique (albeit it didn’t exist formally back then) to both understand and explain complex concepts from physics and mathematics. And I am willing to bet that most of the things we want to learn aren’t as complex as Feynman’s, so… yay!
What I’m Reading
Why Books Don’t Work — “Human progress in the era of mass communication makes clear that some readers really do absorb deep knowledge from books, at least some of the time. So why do books seem to work for some people sometimes? Why does the medium fail when it fails?”
The UK’s Coronavirus Policy May Sound Scientific. It Isn’t — “The error in the UK is on two levels—modelling and policymaking.”
Wounds Heal, Scars Last — “We’ll recover from COVID-19, however long it takes. Stores will reopen, businesses will rebuild. The wounds will heal just like they did after September 11th. But what about the scars?”
Covid-19, the Evil Genius, and How to Think about Societal Risks — “How much risk of loss of life people are willing to accept likely depends on how one asks the question.”
The list of all the articles I’ve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 30, 29, and 28.
What I’m Pondering
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
What I’m Thinking
If you’ve good income and no desire to impress your neighbours, you’ll get rich pretty fast.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments. And… if you feel like I’ve done a great job writing this piece, be generous and buy me a few cups. ☕️
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋