The Feynman Technique - timeless & effective

this video is sponsored by Squarespace the best way to turn your passion into a website I know that I know nothing this is the socratic Paradox one of the most famous ideas in two Millennia philosophy it's what separates the arrogance know it all from the true scholar who is yes curious but also humble in their path nobody wants to be the prideful one of course but sometimes we are and it's easy to point out the mistakes of other people and hard to spot our own shortcomings of course it's easy for me to sit here and

talk about intellectual humility but on its own that's kind of useless because even if you do accept that as a good value one that should be pursued you still need a mechanism to get there you need a way to test yourself and a way to get feedback because there won't always be a teacher in your career of self-learning to do that you have to know what knowledge you're missing in the first place because you can't solve a problem that you're not aware of trying to learn without any feedback is Risky Business cuz you could syn

hours and hours studying a topic only to then realize you don't really understand it later on and all of that effort was misguided and directionless that's where the fan technique comes in It's A four-step system that can quite literally make you an expert on any topic and I know that sounds too good to be true but it does do that and of course there is effort on your behalf but with some practice and patience it does happen and it's time flexible as well you could finish the whole process in 10 minutes if you're in a

rush or if you want a deeper look you could stretch it out to an hour it's completely up to you above all it offers honest realtime feedback and that is so damn important in learning because we tend to overestimate how much we truly know and it's hard to gauge it's like when you think you're ready for an exam in school but you go into the exam Hall you have the paper in front of you and you realize that was a lie and I'm screwed but hold on there's a problem because who am I to pit

you this I'm not a scholar I'm not a professor I'm not even a North yet and I'm just someone like you who likes to learn their spare time but luckily the name on the tin does not belong to me and that credit is to someone much greater of course Richard Fineman is the name behind this technique and that's why I trust it and I'm confident in sharing it with you he was a famed physicist and actually won a Nobel Prize in physics but perhaps above all he had an amazing reputation as a teacher Not only

was he charismatic which you can actually see in some of his lecture recordings here on YouTube but he was relatable he wasn't like those stuck up professors you sometimes had in college or they'd come in huffing and puffing they'd read off the whiteboard and it was clear they didn't give two about teaching you fan was different because he connected he dropped all of the pp of the academic world the fancy words the twatty attitude and he just shared his knowledge in a humble downto Earth way one of the things he was most famous for which

you'll see in his technique later is that he got these really complicated and Technical ideas from you know quantum physics and stuff and then condense them into simple terms that you or I can understand despite his status people would remark how he felt like a normal human walking with them in the same pursuit of truth but look despite all of these learning techniques sometimes you just don't have the time or the will to learn something from scratch for example I know nothing about web development but that's perfectly fine because Squarespace gives me all of the

resources I need to make it a reality with the fluid engine you can customize every little detail of the website in a drag and drop style so it can perfectly match the vision you have inside your head which is what I've done with my homepage here I also really enjoy the analytics page because it's so interesting to see where the interaction is coming from and whenever you're growing anything online data like that is damn important so this just makes it that one bit easier for you there's also the option to add custom CSS so with

like 5 minutes of research I managed to embed my newsletter signup form directly into the website which is so convenient for me if you head to squarespace.com you can use their free trial to design a website and once you feel ready to launch it you can then go to squarespace.com odesus and use code Odus to get 10% off of that first website so do check that out so what is this technique and how can you put it into motion I don't want to bore you with a long explanation so I'm going to show you how

you can put it into practice with a real example and because it's not a one-sized fits-all approach how you could maybe put a spin on it to better serve you the first step be straightforward enough you study the topic of course it depends on who you are and what you choose to study but I like to use different resources to mix it up different types of media for each of these sources I'll write notes and these will ultimately all end up in the same place which is my obsidian bolt and after about 10 or 20

sources on a topic you should have a pretty solid understanding or at least something to work with and something to talk about now how you write notes and how you can build your own network of notes like you see here is a whole Rabbit Hole so I'm going to link some videos Down Below on how you can set that up how you can approach books and how to take notes effectively of course you can consume just one thing but I do recommend branching out a bit and picking at least a few because that way you

can get a wider perspective One Source might raise a counter argument that you didn't see elsewhere or an interesting idea or an analogy that helps you understand it better and all of that is only exposed to you if you do spread out the more you read the more new ideas come and they just build on top of each other into this mountain of knowledge now with the knowledge that you've earned it's time to take advantage of this technique's Workhorse step two is where you teach what you learn and if that sounds confusing or too much

effort don't worry because there's no classrooms here there's no students there's no teachers when I say teach what you learn I mean share what you know to an imaginary audience or a reader in most cases it's going to be yourself first you pick an idea or a subtopic relating to what you learned now try not to make it too broad because you know it's not easy to summarize the entire history of Rome for example you want to keep it narrow enough to be manageable for example I might be reading about ecology as a whole but

for this example I'm just going to narrow it down to Natural ction you then elaborate and explain the idea as if you're helping someone else understand it and don't stress yourself with fancy words or essay style writing because no teacher is grading these and it's purely a tool for your own learning rather than a final write up plus trying to sound intellectual here might actually be sabotaging all of your efforts because we often use big words as a mask to disguise our ignorance when you work using simple words you are forced to boil the idea

down to its Bare Bones and you can only do that if you understand it intimately and you'll see how we can do that in the next few steps the simplest medium to do this on is a pen and paper you put the title of the topic at the top and then you follow with maybe a description or an explanation a good pointer for this is to write as if you're explaining it to a 7-year-old who's completely oblivious to the idea it may sound like Overkill but as Albert Einstein probably said if you can't explain it

simply you don't know it well enough and that is exactly what this technique lives by it's also super helpful to use diagrams examples and analogies to get your point across because that proves to you that you understand it and can apply it to many different situations and most importantly it's fun I'm not going to you and say that I use this technique for every single thing I learn cuz I don't and if you did that would take way too long in your already busy day I would probably save it for the most important or the

most challenging ideas that I feel deserve that little bit of extra time and attention 90% of the time I use a quickfire version of this technique which takes literally minutes and I'll show you that a bit later we all accept in society that people learn differently so why not apply the same idea to teaching I like to make these nice mind maps of the topic on my whiteboard but you could also do something like a mock speech which is a fancy way to say talking to yourself so the format is completely up to you and

you should do whatever feels right steps three and four are the hardest parts where most of the work is going to be and I wouldn't be dishonest with you and say that this is some hack or trick for effortless learning because it's not it's a tool for Meaningful learning and anything meaningful has to have some effort behind it in step three you spot any gaps in your understanding during the teaching you might be confident for most of it but even then there will be parts that you don't know how to explain or details that you

stumble over and these are the precious things we're looking out for you might see that as a failure at first but why that's exactly what we were looking for that's the precious feedback which we need to grow and to learn and to move past our initial understanding it's the whole point of the technique and without that failure nothing happens this leads naturally to step four which is where you return to the source materials and try to grasp what you are missing during the teaching process I might jot down a few questions that I want to

double check afterwards or things that I'm unsure about I then follow up on those questions I try and answer them and leave feeling more confident than I was beforehand and even if you can explain everything perfectly your time isn't wasted because of course you retain the information better but now you have a natural next step to follow up on if I were in that position I would take inspiration from Toddlers I would ask why why why and that would lead me down this new train of thought that I would have never seen otherwise there will

always be new and exciting things to learn about but they only reveal themselves to you if you look for them through something like this technique normally in step four when you revisit the source material the idea is to have another go it's explaining it so you can do better than last time every new round of teaching gives you a clearer picture but what if you feel like you've already understood it pretty well well you can actually apply a fifth step to make your knowledge bulletproof in this fifth step you take everything you've learned and do

your best to simplify it as much as possible I know it doesn't sound like much at first but trust me once you start it really tests you explaining how batteries work or how Plato viewed the soul is doable when it's someone else who's on your level but explaining that to an imaginary 5-year-old Suddenly It's much harder if you take this idea and you struggle to package it in any way you wish then that's a good sign you're not as confident as you think you are and maybe there's more work to do and if you don't

get what I mean here then I want you to pick an idea that you know inside out something that you're super confident in how would you explain that to a criminal in a street gang how would you then explain it to some rich teenager who's out of touch with Society or a middle-aged woman of course you would change your language you would change the examples you use you would change how you illustrate it and how you deliver it to them a good teacher who truly understands stands a topic can take the same idea and repackage

it 20 times depending on who they're talking to and they're going to change it for them to understand it best and that's the same thing we're trying to do when we simplify the idea so that's the fan technique something that great philosophers and thinkers have been using for thousands of years even before fan put his name on it but it can take a while and you're a busy person so you don't always have that time now I said earlier that I save this only for the most important ideas and I only do it every now

and then and I also said that there was a quick vibe version it may be fast but it uses the same principles as earlier to help you understand what you read it's as simple as rephrasing the main points you encounter I would take the author's message and in the margins or write just a sentence or a phrase summing up that whole idea in my own words if I can do that successfully then it's Pro to myself that I have understood the idea it's that simple and if I notice that I'm struggling to do that I

will of course reread the passage and have a think about it you can repeat this throughout the whole book or video or article and it will only add on a few extra minutes onto your time which makes it a really good option so that's the fing technique and whether you use the short version the long version or a bit of both you should ultimately do what serves you the best and what makes the most sense in your head for learning also I feel like I'm overlooking something here I feel like there's a more Innovative way

to apply this that makes more sense so if you have any ideas on that do let me know my emails are open the comments are open feel free and of course thank you for watching