The Fastest Way to Learn Something Is to Teach It Next Week
I’d been in the field for years when I taught my first class. I thought I knew the material. Then a student in the second row asked why a particular rule existed, and I realised I’d never once asked that question. I knew the rule. I’d applied it a thousand times. I didn’t understand it, and I’d never discovered that because nobody had ever asked me to explain.
That night I learned more about my own trade than in the previous year of doing it. Teaching did that, and it’s done it every time since.
Why explaining works
Doing a thing lets you get by on pattern recognition. You know what to do without knowing why. Explaining it removes that option. To put a thing into words for someone who doesn’t know it, you have to find the structure underneath, the reason behind the rule, the sequence that actually matters. You can’t say it until you’ve seen it, and most of us have never looked.
The gaps show up instantly
Try to explain anything you think you know to a patient listener and count how many times you say “it’s kind of” or “basically” or “you just sort of.” Each one marks a spot where your understanding is a feeling rather than a structure. Those are the places to go back and learn, and you’d never have found them any other way.
You don’t need a classroom
Explain it to a colleague over lunch. Write it up as a page for the next new hire. Answer questions in a forum. Teach your kid. Record yourself explaining it to no one and listen back. Any form of putting it into words for an audience forces the same work. The audience doesn’t need to be large; it needs to be able to say “I don’t follow.”
Schedule the teaching before you’re ready
This is the trick. If you wait until you understand it well enough to teach, you’ll wait forever. Commit to explaining it next week, to someone, and the deadline does the rest. Panic is a fine study aid. I’ve learned entire subjects in the ten days between agreeing to present them and the presentation.
The questions are the gift
Beginners ask the questions experts have stopped noticing. “Why is it done that way?” “What happens if you don’t?” “How do you know when you’ve got it right?” Each one points at an assumption you’d been standing on without seeing. I keep a list of the best questions students have asked, and it’s the most useful document I own about my own work.
It makes you honest
You can fool yourself about what you know. It’s very hard to fool a room, and nearly impossible to fool a twelve-year-old. Teaching keeps you honest about the edges of your competence, which is where all the growth is anyway.
What it built
Deeper knowledge of my trade than practice alone would ever have given. A second career. And a habit of asking “could I explain this?” about anything I think I understand, which turns out to be the fastest test I know for whether I actually do.
This week
Pick one thing you think you know. Commit to explaining it to someone within seven days. Notice every “basically.” Those are your homework.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
One email when the book opens on Kickstarter. Nothing else. Already reading the book? Your Cheat Sheet is at wisdomdeck.com/free.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.