if you can't explain it to a ten-year-old, you don't actually understand it yet. the feynman technique in under a minute — and why going back to basics beats rereading your notes. 🎥 Matt Huang (YouTube)
The Feynman Technique: Learn Anything by Explaining It
How to use the Feynman Technique to break complex ideas into their most basic components and actually understand what you're studying — rooted in first-principles thinking.
Steps
- 1
Pick the concept you're trying to learn and write it down.
- 2
Try to explain it in simple terms — plain words, analogies, as if teaching a ten-year-old.
- 3
Notice where the explanation breaks down: that gap is the part you don't actually understand yet.
- 4
Go back to the source and relearn just that part.
- 5
Repeat until the whole idea holds together in simple language, no matter how complex it looked at the start.