Notes on doing it — Day #253: Why you should blog
The ultimate benefit of sharing your knowledge
Blogging makes you an expert. Well, it does if you’re writing about things you are trying to learn. You can gain the same effect from doing presentations or lecturing. But of those three options I believe blogging is the most accessible.
By attempting to share your knowledge with others you identify holes in your knowledge. When you are struggling to explain something in layman terms it’s a sign that you’re not completely familiar with the topic. Now you can use that information to go back and dive deeper into the topic.
Teaching yourself or someone else is actually step 2 in Richard Feymans technique to learn anything. The Nobel Prize winning physicist believed that anyone can learn anything. On that premise he built his learning technique of 4 steps:
1: Choose a concept to learn
2: Teach it to yourself of someone else
3: Go back to the source material if you got stuck
4: Simplify your explanations and create new analogies
“I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.” — Richard Feynman
Oftentimes we aren’t aware of what we don’t know and that’s the power of the Feyman technique. If we can’t explain a concept we need to revisit it.
