The Feynman Technique: How to Learn Anything

Welcome to the 808 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Friday. Join the 63,073 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Revelo!If you’re a growing technology company, chances are you’re struggling to find talented developers right now.Revelo helps companies like GitHub, Intuit, and Carta hire faster, so they can grow faster! It’s a talent platform that matches you with vetted remote developers in Latin America who work in US time zones. It offers a full-suite platform that covers payroll, benefits, compliance, and more, allowing you to hire full-time remote developers without the headaches.Get matched with vetted candidates within 3 days—guaranteed. They even offer a 100% risk-free 14-day trial. If you’re not satisfied, you pay nothing.SPECIAL OFFER: Revelo is offering Curiosity Chronicle subscribers 20% off the first 3 months of any hire! Use the link below to take advantage of this crazy deal!Today at a Glance:Curiosity and inspiration are perishable—they must be acted upon when they strike. But unfortunately, despite its importance to your career and life, learning is not a skill we’re ever explicitly taught how to approach.The Feynman Technique is a beautiful, intuitive framework for learning literally anything.The process in a nutshell: identify a topic, research it deeply, attempt to explain it to a child, and then study to fill in the gaps.The Feynman TechniqueCuriosity is unpredictable.It strikes at random—and often inopportune—moments. But it is also notoriously perishable, so it must be acted upon.Let’s assume for a moment that you've been bit by the curiosity bug and are ready to act on it—ready to learn something new and (hopefully) exciting.Now what? Where do you start? What approach do you take?You’re inspired and motivated to learn, but you don’t even know where to begin.Unfortunately, despite its importance to your career and life, learning is not a skill we’re ever explicitly taught how to approach.Let’s fix that…In today’s piece, I’d like to talk about a beautiful, intuitive framework for learning literally anything: The Feynman Technique.IntroductionRichard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist born in 1918 in New York City.Feynman was a very late talker—he didn’t utter a word until he was three—but it was clear from a young age that he was extremely observant and intelligent. His parents valued non-consensus thinking—they constantly encouraged young Richard to ask questions and think independently.Feynman taught himself advanced mathematics in his teens and would go on to earn a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from Princeton University. He would then become famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics and receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the field.So yes, you could say that Richard Feynman was intelligent...But there are a lot of intelligent people in the world. Feynman's true genius was in his ability to convey extremely complex ideas in simple, elegant, digestible ways—to abstract complexity and deliver simplicity.He had observed at a young age that complex language is often used to mask a lack of deep understanding. As a rule of thumb, if someone uses a lot of acronyms and jargon to explain something to you, they probably don’t understand it very well themselves.We've all encountered this type of “expert” at one time or another…What was Richard Feynman’s secret? He had developed a learning framework—accidentally or intentionally—that forced a deep, elegant understanding of a topic that most people never achieve.The Feynman Technique: How It WorksThe Feynman Technique can be broken down into five key steps:Set the StageRead & ResearchELI5 (Explain It To Me Like I'm 5)Assess & StudyOrganize, Convey & ReviewLet's walk through each step, including notes on how I personally implement each one in my own learning processes…Step 1: Set the StageWhat’s the topic you want to learn?Starting with a blank page, write the topic at the top and jot down everything you know about it. For some topics, that might be precisely nothing; for others, it might be a lot.The starting point is irrelevant, you’re just setting the stage.Sahil Notes: I like to use Notion for tracking and managing my various research and learning efforts. It’s just a personal preference, so you can identify what works for you. I keep a “Knowledge Neural Net” board and for each new topic, I create a new page. I can then go back and connect ideas and topics as I see fit.Step 2: Read & ResearchNow that you have a baseline of your starting knowledge, you can begin your reading and research.The most effective strategy for research: start horizontal, then go vertical.Horizontal = BreadthVertical = DepthHere’s a simple visualization of how I think about this process:Horizontal Research (“HR”): Lays the foundation for your learning. When you start horizontal,...