The Feynman Learning Technique

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.