We recommend the following two proven techniques for improving your learning.

The Feynman Technique

If you want to supercharge your learning, the single most effective technique we’ve uncovered for absorbing new concepts comes from the famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The Feynman Technique ensures you understand what you learn. It includes the following four steps:

1. Choose a concept you wish to learn about.
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a child—a sixth-grader, specifically. Write your explanation down or say it out loud.
3. Identify any gaps in your understanding that might show up when you try to simplify the concept; go back to the source material to find the information you need.
4. Review and simplify your explanation again.

It works because writing out a concept in language a child would understand forces you to understand it at a deeper level. Sometimes we use jargon and complicated language to hide what we don’t understand. The Feynman Technique lays bare the true extent of our knowledge.

Similarly, asking better questions is a route to faster learning. The most mundane questions—the ones a sixth-grader might ask—can sometimes teach us the most because they require an explanation that digs into the details.

How do you know if you’ve truly learned a new concept? Feynman proposed a simple alternate test: try to rephrase it in your own language without using its actual name. For instance, describe what enables a dog to run without using the word “energy.”

Spaced repetition

Rote memorization doesn’t work. Period. The key to effective learning is spaced repetition, a technique that works with the way your brain naturally retains information, not against it.

Spaced repetition involves revising information at increasing intervals. This reflects and combats the fact that once you learn something you gradually forget it, with the forgetting happening fast at first, then leveling off. Using spaced repetition, you remind yourself of information often at first, then less often.

Memory mastery comes from repeated exposure to new material. In order to learn something, you need to retrieve it from memory again and again. Retrieval makes information stick even better than re-exposing yourself to the original material.