The Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster
Farnam Street (Shane Parrish), after Richard Feynman · 2012
"You don't actually understand something until you can explain it in plain language a 12-year-old could follow — complexity and jargon are usually masking a gap in your own understanding, not evidence of sophistication."
The technique has four steps: (1) pick a concept and write down everything you currently know about it; (2) try to explain it in words simple enough for a 12-year-old to follow; (3) go back to the source material wherever your explanation breaks down or gets vague, and refine it; (4) test your simplified explanation by actually teaching it to someone else without notes.
The mechanism is that writing forces better thinking than merely feeling like you understand something: putting an idea into your own simple words exposes gaps and hand-waving that stay comfortably hidden as long as the idea remains an unspoken, jargon-wrapped impression in your head — as Mortimer Adler put it, 'the person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.'
What are the four steps of the Feynman Technique, in order?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Why Write? (on how writing reveals gaps in understanding)Farnam Street
- This Is Water (David Foster Wallace, 2005)David Foster Wallace / Farnam Street
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