In 2014, when Elon Musk was asked on a Reddit AMA about how he learns so many things, so quickly, his response was, “…it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Alternatively, you can visualize this as a mind map growing over time. The more the branches connected to the central node, the core idea, the easier it is to write notes about new sub-themes, as there would already be a bigger branch to link it to.

But how can we create such connections?

Seek Understanding

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was an eccentric person. His work in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) influenced fields of nanotechnology, quantum computing, and particle physics. At the same time, he had a deep passion for painting and music. In fact, he was frequently spotted playing bongo at strip clubs. But amid all this, the beauty lies in how he brought all these eccentricities together, that made him “The Great Explainer.”

In James Gleick’s biography of Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, he recalls his learning technique. “He opened a fresh notebook. On the title page, he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject,”

Feynman was a big proponent of “understanding,” which is the deep assimilation of information as a part of our being, as contrary to shallow “knowing.” This is illustrated in his example below:

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany, it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese, they call it a chung ling, and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people: what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.

This forms the basis of the famous Feynman Technique, a mental model to learn effectively, and not just to remember things.

The Feynman Technique

The gist of the Feynman Technique is that to understand a concept well, you should try to teach it to a child in simple language. This 4-step process, which refines your understanding with each iteration, can be summarized like this.

1. Identify the subject:

  • Write down everything you know about a topic

  • Add new information to the existing body of knowledge as you get it

2. Pretend to teach it to a child:

  • Express the information in a way as if you were teaching a child, someone with limited vocabulary and a short attention span

  • If you can teach a complex topic to a child, you know it well

    • Use simple language: Stay away from jargon and complex words, which create the illusion of knowledge but are mere deceptions to hide our lack of understanding

    • Aim for brevity: Use as few words to explain as possible. This will limit noise in your knowledge

3. Identify your knowledge gaps:

  • Note down all the parts where you struggled in Step 2

  • Go back to the source material and research to clarify doubts and learn further

4. Organize your knowledge as a story:

  • Once done, reorganize your knowledge freshly as an end-to-end story

  • If the explanation sounds confusing, go back to Step 2

If you notice, the essence is the same as the first principles, which helps you cut out all the complexities and stick to the fundamental truths. This method strips off any deceptions we have for ourselves and makes us face our own ignorance, something the ego hates but must be accepted to avoid failure in high-pressure situations.

In the end, operate from curiosity and passion for the world, not to prove superiority. Be the proponent of signal, in the ocean of noise. See the world’s beauty through a holistic lens, not limited to a single discipline. As Feynman once said on the intersection of art and science:

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. … It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.