Day 5: How to learn subjects that are above your level

This is a temporary archive of the 2015 Learn Faster bootcamp emails. After Monday, July 6th, 2015, this will be removed. If you want to get access to the other emails in this series, please sign up here.

This is the fifth day in a week-long learning faster bootcamp. Today I’m going to explain the method I use for tackling books and classes that I haven’t learned the prerequisite subjects.

In case you missed them, here are the previous lessons in the bootcamp:

Day 1: How to stop forgetting what you read
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/06/22/stop-forgetting/

Day 2: What matters more: method or motivation? The answer might surprise you…
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-2/

Day 3: How to learn backwards (and why it will actually save you time)
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-3/

Day 4: How I was able to put in 8+ hours of focus per day during the MIT Challenge
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-4/

Please note that these email links above are only a temporary archive. Once the bootcamp is done, I’ll be taking them down and moving them into the Learning on Steroids archive.

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Nobody likes to feel stupid. Unfortunately, when you try learning something above your level, that’s exactly how you feel. The teacher will use words you’ve never heard before, assuming you know them perfectly. The textbook author will casually reference facts that you, of course, are already aware of, except you’ve never seen them before.

Taking on subjects above your level can be even more disheartening when the rest of your peers seem to learn it effortlessly.

I remember taking an intensive French class while in France. I was put with students who had been studying French for years, and I could barely keep up. The teacher would correct me on an “obvious” mistake, chastising me for not recognizing it, except I had never been told before it was an error.

I’ve never been lacking confidence in learning, but taking a class like that certainly shook mine.

“How come everyone else thinks this is so easy, when it’s so hard for me?”

In this lesson, I want to challenge your thinking about learning hard subjects. Learning subjects above your level, and eventually excelling at them, requires a good method, but it also requires a correct appreciation of how learning works. If you have the wrong picture of what it takes to learn something, it is easy to get into the trap that you’re simply not mentally equipped to learn the subject.

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Subjects are only hard because you’re missing some of the pieces.

I want you to remember that because it’s easy to think that some subjects require a certain level of intelligence to tackle. That’s not true. Some subjects are harder than others, but whenever you find a subject difficult, the answer is always because you’re missing some of the pieces of knowledge you need to make it easy.

If you’re missing pieces you need to find them and master them.

Tackling subjects above your level boils down to just this: figuring out what are the pieces you’re missing, and mastering them until they can be used automatically. Once you have all the missing pieces a subject isn’t difficult any more.

This does mean that it will take some people a lot longer to learn certain classes. If they have more missing pieces, it will take longer to find those pieces and to master them.

Trying to take an advanced class in quantum mechanics before you’ve passed algebra is possible, but the number of pieces missing means it might take you a few years before passing it is a possibility.

But this also means that there are no classes or subjects which are intrinsically too difficult or challenging for you to tackle. If you’re patient, find the missing pieces and master them, you can learn anything.

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This theory-of-missing-pieces is based on something cognitive scientists call “chunking”. Chunking is an incredible process by which well-rehearsed pieces of information get fused together into a single chunk, which can be manipulated in working memory as a single unit instead of component pieces.

A good analogy to this is like LEGO bricks. Imagine each fact, step, connection or association is a single brick. Being able to solve a complex problem might require hundreds, if not thousands, of separate individual bricks.

Unfortunately, the brain is severely limited in its working memory capacity. Original studies suggested that human beings can remember between 5-9 items. More recent research, however, has set the bar even lower—it may be that we can only manipulate about 3-5 pieces of information at a time.

Given this incredible constraint, how do we learn anything? The answer is by chunking. It turns out we can, through practice, connect the bricks into single units. By taking all the different pieces of information and building complex structures, we can solve problems even though we can only manipulate a small amount of objects in our mind at any given time.

The nice thing about this explanation is that it shows you how to learn anything. If a problem seems difficult for you, it’s because you haven’t assembled the component chunks yet. You’re either missing pieces (in the form of LEGO bricks you don’t yet possess) or you haven’t connected them up properly so that you can use them at the same time.

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Trying to solve this problem was the origin of the Feynman technique. The Feynman technique was inspired by Richard Feynman, the Nobel-prize winning physicist.

In Feynman’s autobiography, he talks about how he handled a particular physics paper that he didn’t understand. His method was simple, he went through meticulously, every source reference and carefully went through each line of the paper until he understood everything, piece-by-piece.

Feynman was certainly a genius. But he also understood that learning something isn’t a magical ability, it’s simply the act of gathering the pieces you’re missing: in the form of facts, procedural steps or connections between ideas, and then fully understanding those pieces so they can be used to understand bigger, harder ideas.

Following Feynman’s lead, I tried to encapsulate this method into a method I call the Feynman technique. It’s very simple:

1. Take whatever idea/subject/problem you don’t understand. Try to be as specific as possible and focus on whatever you understand the least.
2. Try to write an explanation for the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else. This requirement forces you to be explicit in your thinking, forbidding you from skipping over something you haven’t properly thought through in your head.
3. Whenever you get stuck, you know that you’re missing a piece of understanding. Now go back to the book, your notes, a peer or a teacher and ask them what your missing. Very often you can do this entirely on your own and it will become obvious what you missed.

The Feynman technique helps you locate the pieces of your cognitive chunks that you’re missing to solve a problem. But it doesn’t usually, by itself, allow you to master those chunks. For that you need to do practice work and active recall, like we discussed in the lessons for days one and three.

However, just knowing what you need to learn, in a step-by-step fashion, is half the battle for tackling hard subjects.

Take Action Now

I know many of you have heard of the Feynman technique before. Some of you have even used it. Regardless of whether you’ve tried it or not, you may not have been familiar with the theory of cognitive chunks and missing pieces, so I want you to take action now so that insight will be at your fingertips the next time you need it.

Here’s how to take action:

1. Pick an idea you’ve been having a hard time wrapping your head around. It could be a complex concept, procedure or explanation.
2. Try, out loud, explaining to yourself the idea and pay attention to where you get stuck.
3. When you get stuck, reformulate your difficulty as a question and search for the answer, using your notes, Google, a peer or a teacher.
4. Write down, in one sentence, what was the missing piece that stopped your understanding.

That’s it for today. I’ve just touched on the basics of this method. In Learning on Steroids, we have an entire module dedicated to the different nuances of this tactic that can help you form different levels of insight you need for different subjects.