How To Study Hard - Richard Feynman

You ask me if an ordinary person, by studying hard, would get to be able to imagine these things like I imagined. Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There's no miracle people. It just happens. They got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff. They're just people. There's no talent, a special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. So if you say, you take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics and time, then he's become a scientist. Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics. He was famously called the great explainer because he was not only a great scientist but also an awesome teacher. He has solidly stated that hard work is mandatory for succeeding in the area that you love. Given that hard work is a must and not just smart work, the question that remains is how do we study hard in a way that actually gets us results? In this video, I'm going to talk about the one study technique that I wish that I had incorporated into my personal studies much sooner and it's called the Feynman technique. When it comes to studies, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. But the irony is that you're the easiest person to fool and it's not by anybody else. It's by you yourself. So again, this statement over here is something that Richard Feynman has famously said and this is where the Feynman technique becomes extremely handy and powerful. The Feynman technique just has four steps. The first step is take any topic that you want to study and go ahead and spend some time with the material you have and study the topic. Let's say I'm trying to learn about recursion and for example let's say that we are learning about the Josephus problem which says that there are a set of friends around a circle and then you keep counting a certain number like for example you start over here one two three this guy is eliminated one two three this guy is eliminated and it goes on like this till only one person is left. So as part of the step one of the Feynman technique, you have to spend time with whatever material you have to Once you're done studying the topic, go ahead and try to teach that topic to another person. If you're like most people and if you don't have somebody handy to teach the topic to, then what you can do is take a piece of paper and try to imagine that you're teaching the topic to somebody else and write down concepts on that paper as well as speak out loud while you're trying to teach the topic. So I've learned the Josephus or the winner of the circle game problem. Now step number two is to enact teaching it to someone. So let's take a look at it. So what I've learned is that if there are let's say four people in a circle and let's say we start to count over here and we're going to keep counting three so one two three this guy is eliminated one two three this guy is eliminated one two three this guy is eliminated and this person is at the safe position now using this I can find the solution to a bigger problem where let's say I have five people now the way I can do this is by just adding k which was the number of time people that we counted at a time so if I add k to this one plus three I'll get the answer as four and this would be the safe position in the bigger problem over here you can see the power of the feynman technique I just tried to teach what I learned but over here notice I'm not able to fool myself when you do this you will easily be able to pinpoint areas where your understanding is not thorough this is the power of the feynman technique it ensures that you don't fool yourself with get just going by the feeling that you have learned something when you have not actually learned it and when there are gaps but it immediately pinpoints areas where your understanding is not clear and it thus helps you to revisit the material and solidify your learning which is step number three as I keep teaching this various types of questions and gaps reveal themselves to me I for example think what if the safe position in this case was let's say at position three now if I add three to position three I would get six which is outside the scope of five so there is a gap over there so I go ahead and come back and revisit the material which I have and I learned that I not only have to add k but I also have to take modulo or percentage n in this case that's five to convert such a scenario like let's say the safe position over here was three then three plus three would be six but six percentage or modulo five which is actually giving me the reminder when I divide this by five gives me one so that's again within the scope so over here I identified a gap and the feynman technique helped me to identify this and gave me an opportunity to revisit my study material to learn this in a more thorough manner once you're done with this we move on to step number four the fourth and final step of the feynman technique is that once you have understood the areas where your understanding was shaky or not solid come back to the topic and try to teach the topic again in an imaginary manner so you can take a piece of paper and again speak out loud while you write on the piece of paper and try to teach the topic to somebody but this time simplify it don't use any jargons imagine you're teaching a 10 year old child now that I have revisited the material and I have learned this thoroughly let me try to teach this again so I again go through the motions maybe I take a fresh piece of paper I write this down and then I demonstrate how using the solution of a sub problem I can find the solution to a bigger problem but this time my aim is to simplify not use jargons like why does this actually work and probably use an analogy so an analogy that I could use over here is that why this works is actually over here notice that when we start to count over here one two three this is the first person who is eliminated now if I go ahead and write over here one next to four and over here two and over here three and over here four notice that I have converted the bigger problem to the sub problem and this is why converting one to four actually works in this way you will be able to solidly and deeply understand the topic at hand now the feynman technique is useful to first learn something or to go deeper into something that you're already have an understanding about and it can be especially useful in preparing for various examinations so we have discussed the powerful technique called the feynman technique which is one of my favorite techniques to learn something I like to combine this with a carefully curated checklist which helps me to enter the flow state remember the carefully curated checklist is not your ordinary checklist why don't you check out this video to know more about it