Memory & Learning Breakthrough: It Turns Out That The Ancients Were Right
Author’s Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.
Research confirms.
Have you ever wondered…
What’s the fastest, most effective way to learn?
What’s the secret to remembering what you learn?
When it comes to learning how to learn, these are the big questions. If you have a better answer to them, you will be more successful. Period.
Learning faster than others is the ultimate, lasting competitive advantage. Self-made billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time business partner, captures this truism in the following quote:
Without Warren Buffett being a learning machine, the [Berkshire Hathaway investing] record would have been absolutely impossible. The same is true at lower walks of life. I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they’re learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than when they get up.
—Charlie Munger
This is why I’ve spent the last several years researching, writing about, and teaching the subject of learning how to learn to thousands of students and more than ten million readers.
As time has passed, a few methods have proven particularly life-changing and have now become pillars of my daily learning routine. These include the practices of:
Collecting the most useful, universal, and timeless mental models in the world to build a base of rare and valuable knowledge that is instantly practical, applies across domains, will never expire, and that will compound—all to become a modern polymath.
Using the 5-Hour Rule to set aside a minimum of 5 hours per week (typically 25 for me) for deliberate learning.
Doing Fractal Reading to find breakthrough knowledge that could change the trajectory of my life.
Using the 10,000-Experiment Rule to constantly find new, high-leverage ways to test my knowledge in the real world.
This article introduces a fifth pillar that is both profound and obvious. It has been tried and true for thousands of years, yet it’s also a modern breakthrough backed by research.
The idea is simple: Teach what you learn—as soon as you learn it.
Introducing The Explanation Effect
I don’t know what I think until I write it down.
―Joan Didion
Research shows that when we teach what we learn, something magical happens in our minds. We suddenly notice mistakes in our thinking. We have more creative insights. Our ideas become sharper. We remember what we learned for longer. We see patterns more effectively. We get feedback that improves our idea. This magic is what I call the Explanation Effect mental model. And it even applies when we teach concepts to ourselves by journaling, mind mapping, or talking out loud.
You’ve experienced the power of the Explanation Effect mental model if you have ever:
Learned something new about what you were teaching as you were preparing for or actually teaching it.
Started unconsciously deliberating on (even dreaming about) a presentation days before you actually delivered it.
Started explaining an idea to someone else only to realize that you didn’t actually understand the idea as well as you thought you did.
Gotten new ideas from a student, reader, or conversation partner that helped take the idea to the next level.
Here’s what’s happening on a deeper level that creates the magic of the Explanation Effect mental model…
How The Explanation Effect Helps You Learn Faster
Learning is NOT just about taking in information. In my experience coaching hundreds of people on learning how to learn, almost no one has a system for processing information. It’s almost as if people just expect the learning to happen automatically after they read a book, listen to a podcast, watch a lecture, or have a life experience. Looking at text and expecting to learn is not far off from looking at food and expecting to get its nutrients. We need to digest our life experiences just like we digest our food. Without some form of active processing, almost everything we read is lost within weeks.
As the diagram below shows, absorbing information is just the first step in the universal process for learning, which I call the learning loop.
The information we absorb must be transformed in our brains to make it understandable and usable. Then, we must take action in the real world to get results. Finally, feedback from the real world helps us improve the whole learning process before we go through the loop again.
Teaching is powerful because it helps at ALL four stages.
When we incorporate teaching into our daily lives, we exponentially increase our learning potential, build deeper relationships with those around us, and make a bigger impact on the world.
Not only that, teaching is compelling on a whole other level NOW because we live in a digitally connected world…
How A Digitally Connected World Exponentially Increases The Power Of The Explanation Effect
When you give knowledge away, not only do you also keep it, it actually grows stronger in your mind. It’s easy to take this for granted. But, just consider how wonderful it would be if you could get rich by literally handing people money. Yet that’s exactly how knowledge works!
The leverage of teaching is almost unfathomable. We can spend years learning a concept and yet transfer it to someone else in minutes. That’s 100x leverage.
The Internet allows us to share our knowledge on a whole other scale. Rather than just sharing the knowledge in our head with one person through conversation, we can share it with millions of people instantly at no cost. There is NOTHING more scalable than teaching.
Teaching is on track to becoming one of the most lucrative professions. As more people get used to regularly buying online courses and paying for coaching, the number of occupations where people get paid primarily for teaching is exploding. We now have coaches, managers, thought leaders, mentors, authors, investors, advisors, journalists, facilitators, and consultants, to name a few. There is also a small but growing breed of celebrity teachers who generate millions of dollars and impact millions of people. For example, podcaster Joe Rogan’s audience is bigger than any network TV news show and is rumored to be on track to earn $100 million this year. He has done all of this with only a few people on his team. (Note: If you want to become a celebrity teacher, you can get started here.)
Teaching may be the future of the sharing economy. Two of the biggest businesses created in the last 10 years are Uber and Airbnb. These sharing economy businesses are based on the idea that the biggest physical assets we own—our house and car—often go unused. Therefore, we can make extra money at minimal cost to us by renting them out. I’d argue that the ultimate unused asset is our brain. It stores the most useful knowledge we have, and most of that knowledge is only shared with a tiny fraction of the people it could be.
What does all of this mean?