Joe’s Method of Learning

by Joe Wilding, 1/17/2019

This post was originally published on my friend’s blog: Bitsnbytes.blog. Andrew’s site has an amazing collection of insights related to programming, leadership, entrepreneurship, and life in general. Check it out!

I was asked by someone recently: “How do you know so much about your field?”  My short answer was, “I read a lot.” To that he replied: “Yeah, but how do you retain all of that knowledge?” I didn’t have a crisp answer at the time.  But, as I have thought about that question since, I have come to realize I have developed a pattern over the years which has allowed me to retain much of the knowledge I have read.

While I have to admit this method requires additional effort, I’m personally convinced it’s required for long-term retention.

The Method

The method consists of two elements. The first is ensuring that you deeply understand the content when you first read the material. The second element is making the content sticky by refreshing your memory of it in a deliberate recurring process.

Deeply learning the topic

There are many ways to fully understand a topic when first exposed to it. If the topic is simple enough, the act of reading it, watching a video, or hearing it explained may be sufficient. For more complex topics, other tactics may be required. For me, they all come down to forming some sort of a model of the concept that makes sense to me. This model can be mental, or something that you actually sketch or turn into a diagram. Good books or other sources will do this for you, but not always.

I prefer to understand how the concept works based on the fundamental governing principles, whether that be physics, math, psychology, economics, etc. If math is involved, I do not gloss over the formulas. I pay attention to the inputs, the units, and the exponents on each variable. I try to deduce why each variable is there, and why others are not. I try to get a feel for how the answer would change based on different values of the inputs. If it is a topic i really want to understand I will enter the formula into a spreadsheet, plot it, and watch how the results change with different inputs. This “live feedback” method can increase your understanding tremendously and very quickly.

I also tend to formulate an understanding of the topic such that I can explain it to someone else. Often, I will literally do that: either out of necessity, or because I am typically surrounded by others who love to learn. It is very powerful to express a concept in your own words and to be prepared to answer questions or explain the parts that are not obvious.

Making it stick

A very unfortunate drawback of the human brain is that the knowledge it contains tends to fade over time. This is particularly true for concepts that are learned and then not accessed again before it is evolved into long-term memory. This means that all of the time and effort you put into learning a new topic could be lost if you don’t take action to make it stick.

This is less of an issue if the learned topic is something you will be using frequently for an extended period of time (such as in your daily job). However, much of what I read is a little more obscure, or something I will need only on infrequent occasions. To ensure this knowledge is not lost, I employ a method I read about many years ago called the Super-Memo Model, developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak.

The following graph shows how this works: