You Can Apply the Feynman technique to Master Pretty Much Any Skill
The most effective method to study any concept or master any skill
I’ve written about this wonderful learning technique several times before. The name of the technique comes from the most amazing teacher of the science of all time, Professor Richard Feynman. Just to give you an idea of how passionate he was about teaching and how conscious he was about his audience, Feynman used to practice for hours in an empty classroom before most of his lectures to make sure that his delivery is to the point and so that he could engage the audience in the most humorous and intellectual manner possible. This wasn’t anything new for Feynman. He has been widely known for his expressive character and charismatic personality.
This story, however, isn’t about Richard Feynman or his life. It’s about a technique that Feynman developed (he did not coin the terms for the technique though) that we can use not just in the field of academics but to learn pretty much skill. This is surprisingly helpful to master any skill, be it understanding a quantum mechanical concept, learning how to draw, or making your first graphic design. I believe this is the most underrated learning technique of all and the ones who use it, mostly use it with the objective to learn an academic concept.
The conventional Feynman technique basically includes five simple steps:
> Choose a topic and start to learn
> Try to explain the topic to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic, it could be your 5 years old cousin or the pen holder that is kept on your table
> Find the gaps in your learning and go back to the resource material to fill in the gaps
> Simplify your understanding and explanation
> Repeat steps 2 and 3 unless you totally nail it!
The first step of the process is to choose a topic of interest or the skill that you want to learn and start studying it. It also involves the process of choosing the right resource materials. This is a very crucial part because if you do not have the appropriate resource materials with you, things won’t turn out to be as you want them to be at the end and your learning outcome will not be as fruitful. Hence, choose the resource material and start to learn. It could be a book, a video, a human being who is an expert on the topic, or a skill, it could be anything.
The second step of the method requires you to try and explain the concept you want to learn or the skill you want to master to someone who is not familiar with the topic. It could be the walls too if you want to. The bottom line is, that you need to teach. Teaching is an important step here. When you teach something to someone, you can actually feel what it is that you are doing wrong because you are not totally unfamiliar with the topic. You know about the topic but you want to master it. This state of knowledge is crucial because you know about the stuff already from the first step. This step, however, helps you find the gaps in your understanding. If you are working on mastering a skill, try to teach the skill to someone else.
The third step is to go back to the resource material and fill in the gaps in your understanding. If you are learning it from a book, go back to the book and correct your mistakes. If you are learning it from some expert, go to them and ask them to help you correct your mistakes. This is the step where you need the humility to admit where you are mistaken and correct your mistakes. If you are learning how to fix your computer from a computer manual, then go back to the manual and see how things actually are. This is one of the most important steps of the technique.
The fourth step is to review whatever you have learned and corrected in your understanding and simplify your understanding and explanation. In this step, you prepare the corrected outcome and this has to be done repeatedly along with steps two and three until you totally master the concept that you’re trying to understand or the skill that you’re trying to learn.
Let us consider this example. You want to master the concepts of partial differential equations in calculus. You have some basic ground knowledge on it but you want cannot solve complicated problems as such. You start to learn all the fundamental theories and techniques to solve the differential equations. With the application of the Feynman technique, you try to explain those methods to a friend of yours who isn’t familiar with partial differential equations or any calculus concept for that matter. When you try to explain things to your friend and help him solve the basic problems, you find out where is it that you yourself are lacking. You can easily identify those gaps in your understanding, it could be your problem-solving techniques or your theoretical concept. Then you go back to the resource material and study again. Then teach again. The cycle repeats until and unless you totally master the problem-solving of PDEs.
It works the same way with any skill you want to master. Consider programming languages, for example. You learn the basics, you try to teach it to someone else, you find the things that you are struggling with, you go back to your resource material and you teach it again. The process repeats until you can teach it so perfectly that another guy can create his/her own application!
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