<ul><li>Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.</li><li>Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.</li><li>Organize and simplify.</li><li>Transmit (optional).</li></ul>

The Feynman Learning Technique, Four Steps

The Feynman Learning Technique is a simple way of approaching anything new you want to learn. Why use it? Because learning doesn’t happen from skimming through a book or remembering enough to pass a test. Information is learned when you can explain it and use it in a wide variety of situations. The Feynman Technique gets more mileage from the ideas you encounter instead of rendering anything new into isolated, useless factoids.

The Feynman Learning Technique, Basic Idea

Take out a blank sheet of paper. At the top, write the subject you want to learn. Now write out everything you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child or a rubber duck sitting on your desk. You are not teaching to your smart adult friend, but rather a child who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships.

Step 1: Pretend to teach it to a child

Areas where you struggle in Step 1 are the points where you have some gaps in your understanding. Identifying gaps in your knowledge—where you forget something important, aren’t able to explain it, or simply have trouble thinking of how variables interact—is a critical part of the learning process. Filling those gaps is when you really make the learning stick.

Step 2: Identify gaps in your explanation

Now you have a set of hand-crafted notes containing a simple explanation. Organize them into a narrative that you can tell from beginning to end. Read it out loud. If the explanation sounds confusing at any point, go back to Step 2. Keep iterating until you have a story that you can tell to anyone who will listen.

Step 3. Organize and simplify

This part is optional, but it’s the logical result of everything you’ve just done. If you really want to be sure of your understanding, run it past someone (ideally someone who knows little of the subject). The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another. You can read out directly what you’ve written. You can present the material like a lecture. You can ask your friends for a few minutes of their time while you’re buying them dinner. All that really matters is that you attempt to transmit the material to at least one person who isn’t that familiar with it.

Step 4: Transmit (optional)

The Feynman Technique is not only a wonderful recipe for learning but also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up.When you’re having a conversation with someone and they start using words or relationships that you don’t understand, ask them to explain it to you like you’re twelve.Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something, as well as how, when you truly know something, you can use that knowledge broadly.

The Feynman Learning Technique, Final Thoughts 

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

The Feynman Learning Technique

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