How to Learn

This post is all about the simple and yet effective learning process one should follow to get hang of any concept.

As the world around us evolves, we seek to constantly learn and absorb new information every day. Learning new skills and concepts is exciting and can expand your views on the world as you know it, making you a better student and human being. As Benjamin Franklin said ‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Richard Feynman, a famous novel prize winner Physicist, used to follow a model to learn any new concept during his entire career. The process is called the Feynman Technique. It involves four basic steps:

1. Pick and Study a topic
2. Explain the topic to yourself, as if you are explaining it to a 5 year old child.
3. Indentify any gap in your understanding.
4. Return to the reread the topic to understand better.

Basically all these steps have some greater significance in understanding a concept. The first step is natural in any learning process. The second sted is the key ingredient for understanding the concept. It expect that you should explain the topic to a kid. It means, you have to over simplify the concept for a kid to understand it. You have to develop an analogy which is simple enough for a 5 year old to understand. If you can do it, then you have learnt the concept and if you feel you need more knowledge for the explanation, then you should go to the third step. In this step, you analyse the gap in your understanding. After that, you reread the concept to understand it better until you cannot explain it to a 5 year old. This way, you will develop a deep sense of understanding of any concept or topic.