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Many student might scoff at the idea of learning a 4-year program in a quarter of the
time. After all, couldnt you just cram for every exam and pass without understanding
anything?
Unfortunately this strategy doesnt work. First, MITs exams rely heavily on problem
solving, often with unseen problem types. Second, MIT courses are highly
cumulative, even if you could sneak by one exam through memorization, the seventh
class in a series would be impossible to follow.
Instead of memorizing, I had to find a way to speed up the process of understanding
itself.
Can You Speed Up Understanding?
Weve all had those, Aha! moments when we finally get an idea. The problem is
most of us dont have a systematic way of finding them. The typical process a student
goes through in learning is to follow a lectures, read a book and, failing that, grind out
practice questions or reread notes.
Without a system, understanding faster seems impossible. After all, the mental
mechanisms for generating insights are completely hidden.
Worse, understanding is hardly an on/off switch. Its like layers of an onion, from
very superficial insights to the deep understandings that underpin scientific
revolutions. Peeling that onion is often a poorly understood process.
The first step is to demystify the process. Getting insights to deepen your
understanding largely amounts to two things:
1. Making connections
2. Debugging errors
Connections are important because they provide an access point for understanding an
idea. I struggled with the Fourier transform until I realized it was turning pressure to
pitch or radiation to color. Insights like these are often making connections between
something you do understand and the material you dont.
Debugging errors is also important because often you make mistakes because youre
missing knowledge or have an incorrect picture. A poor understanding is like a buggy
software program. If you can debug yourself in an efficient way, you can greatly
accelerate the learning process.
Doing these two things, forming accurate connections and debugging errors, is most
of creating a deep understanding. Mechanical skill and memorized facts also help, but
generally only when they sit upon the foundation of a solid intuition about the subject.
The Drilldown Method: A Strategy for Learning Faster
During the yearlong pursuit, I perfected a method for peeling those layers of deep
understanding faster. Ive since used it on topics in math, biology, physics, economics
and engineering. With just a few modifications, it also works well for practical skills
such as programming, design or languages.
Heres the basic structure of the method:
1. Coverage
2. Practice
3. Insight
Ill explain each stage and how you can go through them as efficiently as possible,
while giving detailed examples of how I used them in actual classes.
Stage One: Coverage
You cant plan an attack if you dont have a map of the terrain. Therefore the first step
in learning anything deeply, is to get a general sense of what you need to learn.
For a class, this means watching lectures or reading textbooks. For self-learning it
might mean reading several books on the topic and doing research.
A mistake students often make is believing this stage is the most important. In many
ways this is the least efficient stage because the amount you can learn per unit of time
invested is much lower. I often found it useful to speed up this part so that I would
have more time to spend on the latter two steps.
If youre watching video lectures, a great way to do this is to watch them at 1.5x or 2x
the speed. This can be done easily by downloading the video and then using the
speed-up feature on a player like VLC. Id watch semester-long courses in two days,
via this method.
If youre reading a book, I would recommend against highlighting. This is processes
the information at a low level of depth and is inefficient in the long run. A better
method would be to take sparse notes while reading, or do a one-paragraph summary
after you read each major section.
Heres an example of notes I took while doing readings for a class in machine vision.
Stage Two: Practice
Practice problems are huge for boosting your understanding, but there are two main
efficiency traps you can get caught in if youre not careful.
#1 Not Getting Immediate Feedback
The research is clear: if you want to learn, you need immediate feedback. The best
way to do this is to go question-by-question with the solution key in hand. Once
youve finished a question, check yourself against the provided solutions. Practice
without feedback, or with delayed feedback, drastically hinders effectiveness.
#2 Grinding Problems
Like the students who fall into the trap of believing that most learning occurs in the
classroom, some students believe understanding is generated mostly from practice
questions. While you can eventually build an understanding simply by grinding
through practice, its slow and inefficient.
Practice problems should be used to highlight areas you need to develop a better
intuition for. Then techniques like the Feynman technique, which Ill discuss, handle
that process much more efficiently.
Non-technical subjects, ones where you mostly need to understand concepts, not solve
problems, can often get away with minimal practice problem work. In these subjects,
youre better off spending more time on the third phase, developing insight.
Stage Three: Insight
The goal of coverage and practice questions is to get you to a point where you know
what you dont understand. This isnt as easy as it sounds. Often you can be mistaken
into believing you understand something, but dont, or you might not feel confident
with a general subject, but not see specifically what is missing.
This next technique, which I call the Feynman technique is about narrowing down
those gaps even further. Often when you can identify precisely what you dont
understand, that gives you the tools to fill the gap. Its the large gaps in understanding
which are hardest to fill.
The technique also has a dual purpose. Even when you do understand an idea, it
provides you opportunities to create more connections, so you can drill down to a
deeper understanding.
The Feynman Technique
I first got the idea from this method from the Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard
Feynman. In his autobiography, he describes himself struggling with a hard research
paper. His solution was to go meticulously through the supporting material until he
understood everything that was required to understand the hard idea.
This technique works similarly. By digesting the big hairy idea you dont understand
into small chunks, and learning those chunks, you can eventually fill every gap that
would otherwise prevent you from learning it.
For a video tutorial of this technique, watch this short video.
The technique is simple:
1. Get a piece of paper
2. Write at the top the idea or process you want to understand
3. Explain the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else
Whats crucial is that the third step will likely repeat some areas of the idea you
already understand. However, eventually youll reach a stopping point where you
cant explain. Thats the precise gap in your understanding that you need to fill.
From that gap, you can research the answer from a textbook, teacher or online.
Generally, once youve narrowly defined your misunderstanding it becomes much
easier to find the precise answer.
Ive used this technique hundreds of times, and Ive found it can tackle a wide variety
different learning situations. However, since each might be slightly different, it may
seem hard to apply as a beginner, so Ill try to walk through some different examples.
For Ideas You Dont Get At All
The way I handle this is to go through the technique but have the textbook open to the
chapter explaining that concept. Then I go through and meticulously copy both the
authors explanation, but also try to elaborate and clarify it for myself. This guided
Feynman can be useful when trying to write anything on your own would be
impossible.
For expertise on a topic, the only difference is that, prior to doing coverage, you need
to find a set of material to learn from. That could be research articles or several books
on the topic. In either case, once youve defined the chunk of knowledge you want to
master, you can drill down and learn it deeply.
To find out more about this, join Scotts newsletter and youll get a free copy of his
rapid learning ebook (and a set of detailed case studies of how other learners have
used these techniques).
(Image by afagen.)