How to Improve Your Understanding of Everything 

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) 

They say the best way to learn is to teach. Because teaching something you think you understand will help you understand how much you really don’t know.

That’s been true for me – from trying to teach Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady Sonnets” when I was in graduate school, to teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu students how to gain top position with the “scissors sweep,” to teaching apprentice copywriters how to craft emotionally compelling sales letters.

The idea that it’s easy to think you know something you don’t know was a favorite topic of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who made important contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics, particle physics, quantum computing, and nanotechnology.

Notwithstanding his amazing accomplishments as a scientist, he said the thing he most enjoyed was teaching students about the art of learning while he was a lecturer at Cornell and Caltech. He believed that anyone with ordinary intelligence could learn the most complex subjects “as long as he/she was willing to study hard.”

And he developed a system for that. Learning specialists call it “the Feynman Technique.” If your curiosity dog is not too old to learn new tricks, you’ll enjoy reading about it here.