Learning through Writing

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. — Mortimer Alder

This is the beginning of the year 2021. Many people would set their goals for the new year, and learning new skills are usually a popular goal in people’s lists. Learning new things are always attractive, as perceptual curiosity is a driving force of human being and is deeply rooted in the gene.

It is non-trivial to learn things with quality. If you find yourself quickly forget the things you just learned recently, you probably not learnt it with quality. When setting the learning goals, people usually set the them by quantity rather than quality. For example, read 1 book per month, or study mathematics 1 hour per day. With this type of goal, the investment of the learning time would just be a mere formality. How do we learn things with quality and how to we even quantify the quality of learning? There are no clear answers.

Luckily, the physicist Richard Feynman introduced a method called “Feynman Technique” that can help us easily quantify the quality of study. The technique is very simple:

1. Learn the concept/topic and try to explain it in layman terms. For example, explain the concept/topic to a child.
2. Identify your gap of knowledge when you found it is difficult to explain it easily.
3. Review and simplify your explanation.
4. Go back to step 1.

Things are always easier said than done. Despite the discipline required to strictly execute the foregoing technique, it is also expensive to find someone that you can explain your concept/topic. With this, a more practical method would be writting down your learnt concepts/topics in your own words as the practice of Feynman Technique and publish them as blogs. On one hand, the blogs are public so you have some social pressure to be more discipline. One the other hand, you may accidentally get some feedbacks from the potential audience.