What topic are you curious about?

Once you 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.

As you learn more about the topic, add it to your sheet. Often people find it helpful to use a different color pen so you can see your learning grow.

Once you think you understand the topic, move on to step 2.

Now when you think that 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.

Anyone can make a subject complicated but only someone who understand it can make simple.

Only when you can explain the subject in simple terms do you understand it.

Simple is beautiful.

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 simple explanation.

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 a binder. Following this technique for everything you learn gives you a binder full of learning that you can review a couple of times a year.