Learn Faster
Content
How I Tamed MIT’s Computer Science Curriculum, By Scott Young
I’ve always been excited by the prospect of learning faster. Being good at things
matters. Expertise and mastery give you the career capital to earn more money and
enjoy lifestyle perks. If being good is the goal, learning is how you get there.
Despite the advantages of learning faster, most people seem reluctant to learn how
to learn. Maybe it’s because we don’t believe it’s possible, that learning speed
is solely the domain of good genes or talent.
While there will always be people with unfair advantages, the research shows the
method you use to learn matters a lot. Deeper levels of processing and spaced
repetition can, in some cases, double your efficiency. Indeed the research in
deliberate practice shows us that without the right method, learning can plateau
forever.
Today I want to share the strategy I used to compress the ideas from a 4-year MIT
computer science curriculum down to 12 months. This strategy was honed over 33
classes, figuring out what worked and what didn’t in the method for learning faster.
Why Cramming Doesn’t Work
Many student might scoff at the idea of learning a 4-year program in a quarter of
the time. After all, couldn’t you just cram for every exam and pass without
understanding anything?
Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t work. First, MITs exams rely heavily on
problem solving, often with unseen problem types. Second, MIT courses are highly
cumulative, even if you could sneak by one exam through memorization, the seventh
class in a series would be impossible to follow.
Instead of memorizing, I had to find a way to speed up the process of
understanding itself.
Can You Speed Up Understanding?
We’ve all had those, “Aha!” moments when we finally get an idea. The problem is
most of us don’t have a systematic way of finding them. The typical process a
student goes through in learning is to follow a lectures, read a book and, failing
that, grind out practice questions or reread notes.
Without a system, understanding faster seems impossible. After all, the mental
mechanisms for generating insights are completely hidden.
Worse, understanding is hardly an on/off switch. It’s like layers of an onion,
from very superficial insights to the deep understandings that underpin scientific
revolutions. Peeling that onion is often a poorly understood process.
The first step is to demystify the process. Getting insights to deepen your
understanding largely amounts to two things:
- 1 -
Making connections
Debugging errors
Connections are important because they provide an access point for understanding
an idea. I struggled with the Fourier transform until I realized it was turning
pressure to pitch or radiation to color. Insights like these are often making
connections between something you do understand and the material you don’t.
Debugging errors is also important because often you make mistakes because you’re
missing knowledge or have an incorrect picture. A poor understanding is like a
buggy software program. If you can debug yourself in an efficient way, you can
greatly accelerate the learning process.
Doing these two things, forming accurate connections and debugging errors, is most
of creating a deep understanding. Mechanical skill and memorized facts also help,
but generally only when they sit upon the foundation of a solid intuition about
the subject.
The Drilldown Method: A Strategy for Learning Faster
During the yearlong pursuit, I perfected a method for peeling those layers of deep
understanding faster. I’ve since used it on topics in math, biology, physics,
economics and engineering. With just a few modifications, it also works well for
practical skills such as programming, design or languages.
Here’s the basic structure of the method:
Coverage
Practice
Insight
I’ll explain each stage and how you can go through them as efficiently as
possible, while giving detailed examples of how I used them in actual classes.
Stage One: Coverage
You can’t plan an attack if you don’t have a map of the terrain. Therefore the
first step in learning anything deeply, is to get a general sense of what you need
to learn.
For a class, this means watching lectures or reading textbooks. For self-learning
it might mean reading several books on the topic and doing research.
A mistake students often make is believing this stage is the most important. In
many ways this is the least efficient stage because the amount you can learn per
unit of time invested is much lower. I often found it useful to speed up this part
so that I would have more time to spend on the latter two steps.
If you’re watching video lectures, a great way to do this is to watch them at 1.5x
or 2x the speed. This can be done easily by downloading the video and then using
- 2 -
the speed-up feature on a player like VLC. I’d watch semester-long courses in two
days, via this method.
If you’re reading a book, I would recommend against highlighting. This is
processes the information at a low level of depth and is inefficient in the long
run. A better method would be to take sparse notes while reading, or do a
one-paragraph summary after you read each major section.
Here’s an example of notes I took while doing readings for a class in machine vision.
Stage Two: Practice
Practice problems are huge for boosting your understanding, but there are two main
efficiency traps you can get caught in if you’re not careful.
#1 – Not Getting Immediate Feedback
The research is clear: if you want to learn, you need immediate feedback. The best
way to do this is to go question-by-question with the solution key in hand. Once
you’ve finished a question, check yourself against the provided solutions.
Practice without feedback, or with delayed feedback, drastically hinders
effectiveness.
#2 – Grinding Problems
Like the students who fall into the trap of believing that most learning occurs in
the classroom, some students believe understanding is generated mostly from
practice questions. While you can eventually build an understanding simply by
grinding through practice, it’s slow and inefficient.
Practice problems should be used to highlight areas you need to develop a better
intuition for. Then techniques like the Feynman technique, which I’ll discuss,
handle that process much more efficiently.
Non-technical subjects, ones where you mostly need to understand concepts, not
solve problems, can often get away with minimal practice problem work. In these
subjects, you’re better off spending more time on the third phase, developing
insight.
Stage Three: Insight
The goal of coverage and practice questions is to get you to a point where you
know what you don’t understand. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Often you can be
mistaken into believing you understand something, but don’t, or you might not feel
confident with a general subject, but not see specifically what is missing.
This next technique, which I call the Feynman technique is about narrowing down
those gaps even further. Often when you can identify precisely what you don’t
understand, that gives you the tools to fill the gap. It’s the large gaps in
understanding which are hardest to fill.
- 3 -
The technique also has a dual purpose. Even when you do understand an idea, it
provides you opportunities to create more connections, so you can drill down to a
deeper understanding.
The Feynman Technique
I first got the idea from this method from the Nobel prize winning physicist,
Richard Feynman. In his autobiography, he describes himself struggling with a hard
research paper. His solution was to go meticulously through the supporting
material until he understood everything that was required to understand the hard
idea.
This technique works similarly. By digesting the big hairy idea you don’t
understand into small chunks, and learning those chunks, you can eventually fill
every gap that would otherwise prevent you from learning it.
For a video tutorial of this technique, watch this short video.
The technique is simple:
Get a piece of paper
Write at the top the idea or process you want to understand
Explain the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else
What’s crucial is that the third step will likely repeat some areas of the idea
you already understand. However, eventually you’ll reach a stopping point where
you can’t explain. That’s the precise gap in your understanding that you need to
fill.
From that gap, you can research the answer from a textbook, teacher or online.
Generally, once you’ve narrowly defined your misunderstanding it becomes much
easier to find the precise answer.
I’ve used this technique hundreds of times, and I’ve found it can tackle a wide
variety different learning situations. However, since each might be slightly
different, it may seem hard to apply as a beginner, so I’ll try to walk through
some different examples.
For Ideas You Don’t Get At All
The way I handle this is to go through the technique but have the textbook open to
the chapter explaining that concept. Then I go through and meticulously copy both
the author’s explanation, but also try to elaborate and clarify it for myself.
This “guided” Feynman can be useful when trying to write anything on your own
would be impossible.
Here’s an example I used for trying to understand photogrammetry.
For Procedures
- 4 -
You can also use the method to fully understand a process you need to
through all the steps and explain not only what they do, but how they
I would often go through proof techniques by carefully explaining all
also used it in understanding chemical equations or in organizing the
glycolysis in biology.
use. Go
execute it.
the steps. I
stages of
You can see this example I used when trying to figure out how to implement grid
acceleration.
For Formulas
Formulas should be understood, not just memorized. So when you see a formula, but
can’t understand how it works, try walking through each part with a Feynman.
Here’s an example I used for the Fourier analysis equation.
For Checking Your Memory
Feynmans also offer a way to self-test your knowledge of the big ideas for
non-technical subjects. Being able to finish a Feynman on a topic without
referencing the source material means you understand and can remember it.
Here’s one I did for an economics class, recalling the concept of predatory pricing.
Developing a Deeper Intuition
Combined with practice questions, the Feynman technique can peel those first few
layers of understanding. But it can also drill deeper if you want to go from not
just having an understanding, but to having a deep intuition.
Understanding an idea intuitively isn’t easy. Once again, getting to this point is
often seen as a quasi-mystical process. But it doesn’t have to be. Most intuitions
about an idea break down into one of the following types:
Analogies – You understand an idea by correctly recognizing an important
similarity between it and an easier-to-understand idea.
Visualizations – Abstract ideas often become useful intuitions when we can
form a mental picture of them. Even if the picture is just an incomplete
representation of a larger, and more varied, idea.
Simplifications – A famous scientist once said that if you couldn’t explain
something to your grandmother, you don’t fully understand it. Simplification
is the art of strengthening those connections between basic components and
complex ideas.
You can use the Feynman technique as a way of encouraging these types of insights.
Once you’ve gotten past a basic understanding of the idea, the next step is to go
further and see if you can explain it using some combination of the three methods
above.
The truth is plagiarism is okay too, and not every insight needs to be unique.
Understanding complex numbers as being two dimensional is hardly original, but it
- 5 -
allows a useful visualization. DNA replication working like a one-way zipper is
not a perfect analogy, but so long as you understand where it overlaps, it becomes
a useful one.
The Strategy to Learn Faster
Learning faster doesn’t need to be a trick to work well. It simply means
recognizing what is actually going on when we reach a new level of insight and
finding tools to help us reach those stages consistently.
In this article I described learning as being three stages: coverage, practice and
insight. This gives the false impression that these three occur always in distinct
phases and never overlap or repeat.
In truth you may find yourself going between them in a loop as you successfully
peel down to deeper layers of understanding. The first time you read a chapter you
may get only superficial insights, but after doing practice questions and building
intuitions, you may go back and read for deeper understandings.
Applying the Drilldown Method for Non-Students
This process isn’t one you need to be a student to apply. It also works for
learning complex skills or building expertise on a topic.
For skills like programming or design, most people follow the first two stages.
They read a book teaching them the basics, then they practice with a project. You
can extend that process however, and use the Feynman technique to better lock in
and articulate the insights you create.
For expertise on a topic, the only difference is that, prior to doing
coverage, you need to find a set of material to learn from. That could
be research articles or several books on the topic. In either case,
once you’ve defined the chunk of knowledge you want to master, you can
drill down and learn it deeply.
- 6 -
I’ve always been excited by the prospect of learning faster. Being good at things
matters. Expertise and mastery give you the career capital to earn more money and
enjoy lifestyle perks. If being good is the goal, learning is how you get there.
Despite the advantages of learning faster, most people seem reluctant to learn how
to learn. Maybe it’s because we don’t believe it’s possible, that learning speed
is solely the domain of good genes or talent.
While there will always be people with unfair advantages, the research shows the
method you use to learn matters a lot. Deeper levels of processing and spaced
repetition can, in some cases, double your efficiency. Indeed the research in
deliberate practice shows us that without the right method, learning can plateau
forever.
Today I want to share the strategy I used to compress the ideas from a 4-year MIT
computer science curriculum down to 12 months. This strategy was honed over 33
classes, figuring out what worked and what didn’t in the method for learning faster.
Why Cramming Doesn’t Work
Many student might scoff at the idea of learning a 4-year program in a quarter of
the time. After all, couldn’t you just cram for every exam and pass without
understanding anything?
Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t work. First, MITs exams rely heavily on
problem solving, often with unseen problem types. Second, MIT courses are highly
cumulative, even if you could sneak by one exam through memorization, the seventh
class in a series would be impossible to follow.
Instead of memorizing, I had to find a way to speed up the process of
understanding itself.
Can You Speed Up Understanding?
We’ve all had those, “Aha!” moments when we finally get an idea. The problem is
most of us don’t have a systematic way of finding them. The typical process a
student goes through in learning is to follow a lectures, read a book and, failing
that, grind out practice questions or reread notes.
Without a system, understanding faster seems impossible. After all, the mental
mechanisms for generating insights are completely hidden.
Worse, understanding is hardly an on/off switch. It’s like layers of an onion,
from very superficial insights to the deep understandings that underpin scientific
revolutions. Peeling that onion is often a poorly understood process.
The first step is to demystify the process. Getting insights to deepen your
understanding largely amounts to two things:
- 1 -
Making connections
Debugging errors
Connections are important because they provide an access point for understanding
an idea. I struggled with the Fourier transform until I realized it was turning
pressure to pitch or radiation to color. Insights like these are often making
connections between something you do understand and the material you don’t.
Debugging errors is also important because often you make mistakes because you’re
missing knowledge or have an incorrect picture. A poor understanding is like a
buggy software program. If you can debug yourself in an efficient way, you can
greatly accelerate the learning process.
Doing these two things, forming accurate connections and debugging errors, is most
of creating a deep understanding. Mechanical skill and memorized facts also help,
but generally only when they sit upon the foundation of a solid intuition about
the subject.
The Drilldown Method: A Strategy for Learning Faster
During the yearlong pursuit, I perfected a method for peeling those layers of deep
understanding faster. I’ve since used it on topics in math, biology, physics,
economics and engineering. With just a few modifications, it also works well for
practical skills such as programming, design or languages.
Here’s the basic structure of the method:
Coverage
Practice
Insight
I’ll explain each stage and how you can go through them as efficiently as
possible, while giving detailed examples of how I used them in actual classes.
Stage One: Coverage
You can’t plan an attack if you don’t have a map of the terrain. Therefore the
first step in learning anything deeply, is to get a general sense of what you need
to learn.
For a class, this means watching lectures or reading textbooks. For self-learning
it might mean reading several books on the topic and doing research.
A mistake students often make is believing this stage is the most important. In
many ways this is the least efficient stage because the amount you can learn per
unit of time invested is much lower. I often found it useful to speed up this part
so that I would have more time to spend on the latter two steps.
If you’re watching video lectures, a great way to do this is to watch them at 1.5x
or 2x the speed. This can be done easily by downloading the video and then using
- 2 -
the speed-up feature on a player like VLC. I’d watch semester-long courses in two
days, via this method.
If you’re reading a book, I would recommend against highlighting. This is
processes the information at a low level of depth and is inefficient in the long
run. A better method would be to take sparse notes while reading, or do a
one-paragraph summary after you read each major section.
Here’s an example of notes I took while doing readings for a class in machine vision.
Stage Two: Practice
Practice problems are huge for boosting your understanding, but there are two main
efficiency traps you can get caught in if you’re not careful.
#1 – Not Getting Immediate Feedback
The research is clear: if you want to learn, you need immediate feedback. The best
way to do this is to go question-by-question with the solution key in hand. Once
you’ve finished a question, check yourself against the provided solutions.
Practice without feedback, or with delayed feedback, drastically hinders
effectiveness.
#2 – Grinding Problems
Like the students who fall into the trap of believing that most learning occurs in
the classroom, some students believe understanding is generated mostly from
practice questions. While you can eventually build an understanding simply by
grinding through practice, it’s slow and inefficient.
Practice problems should be used to highlight areas you need to develop a better
intuition for. Then techniques like the Feynman technique, which I’ll discuss,
handle that process much more efficiently.
Non-technical subjects, ones where you mostly need to understand concepts, not
solve problems, can often get away with minimal practice problem work. In these
subjects, you’re better off spending more time on the third phase, developing
insight.
Stage Three: Insight
The goal of coverage and practice questions is to get you to a point where you
know what you don’t understand. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Often you can be
mistaken into believing you understand something, but don’t, or you might not feel
confident with a general subject, but not see specifically what is missing.
This next technique, which I call the Feynman technique is about narrowing down
those gaps even further. Often when you can identify precisely what you don’t
understand, that gives you the tools to fill the gap. It’s the large gaps in
understanding which are hardest to fill.
- 3 -
The technique also has a dual purpose. Even when you do understand an idea, it
provides you opportunities to create more connections, so you can drill down to a
deeper understanding.
The Feynman Technique
I first got the idea from this method from the Nobel prize winning physicist,
Richard Feynman. In his autobiography, he describes himself struggling with a hard
research paper. His solution was to go meticulously through the supporting
material until he understood everything that was required to understand the hard
idea.
This technique works similarly. By digesting the big hairy idea you don’t
understand into small chunks, and learning those chunks, you can eventually fill
every gap that would otherwise prevent you from learning it.
For a video tutorial of this technique, watch this short video.
The technique is simple:
Get a piece of paper
Write at the top the idea or process you want to understand
Explain the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else
What’s crucial is that the third step will likely repeat some areas of the idea
you already understand. However, eventually you’ll reach a stopping point where
you can’t explain. That’s the precise gap in your understanding that you need to
fill.
From that gap, you can research the answer from a textbook, teacher or online.
Generally, once you’ve narrowly defined your misunderstanding it becomes much
easier to find the precise answer.
I’ve used this technique hundreds of times, and I’ve found it can tackle a wide
variety different learning situations. However, since each might be slightly
different, it may seem hard to apply as a beginner, so I’ll try to walk through
some different examples.
For Ideas You Don’t Get At All
The way I handle this is to go through the technique but have the textbook open to
the chapter explaining that concept. Then I go through and meticulously copy both
the author’s explanation, but also try to elaborate and clarify it for myself.
This “guided” Feynman can be useful when trying to write anything on your own
would be impossible.
Here’s an example I used for trying to understand photogrammetry.
For Procedures
- 4 -
You can also use the method to fully understand a process you need to
through all the steps and explain not only what they do, but how they
I would often go through proof techniques by carefully explaining all
also used it in understanding chemical equations or in organizing the
glycolysis in biology.
use. Go
execute it.
the steps. I
stages of
You can see this example I used when trying to figure out how to implement grid
acceleration.
For Formulas
Formulas should be understood, not just memorized. So when you see a formula, but
can’t understand how it works, try walking through each part with a Feynman.
Here’s an example I used for the Fourier analysis equation.
For Checking Your Memory
Feynmans also offer a way to self-test your knowledge of the big ideas for
non-technical subjects. Being able to finish a Feynman on a topic without
referencing the source material means you understand and can remember it.
Here’s one I did for an economics class, recalling the concept of predatory pricing.
Developing a Deeper Intuition
Combined with practice questions, the Feynman technique can peel those first few
layers of understanding. But it can also drill deeper if you want to go from not
just having an understanding, but to having a deep intuition.
Understanding an idea intuitively isn’t easy. Once again, getting to this point is
often seen as a quasi-mystical process. But it doesn’t have to be. Most intuitions
about an idea break down into one of the following types:
Analogies – You understand an idea by correctly recognizing an important
similarity between it and an easier-to-understand idea.
Visualizations – Abstract ideas often become useful intuitions when we can
form a mental picture of them. Even if the picture is just an incomplete
representation of a larger, and more varied, idea.
Simplifications – A famous scientist once said that if you couldn’t explain
something to your grandmother, you don’t fully understand it. Simplification
is the art of strengthening those connections between basic components and
complex ideas.
You can use the Feynman technique as a way of encouraging these types of insights.
Once you’ve gotten past a basic understanding of the idea, the next step is to go
further and see if you can explain it using some combination of the three methods
above.
The truth is plagiarism is okay too, and not every insight needs to be unique.
Understanding complex numbers as being two dimensional is hardly original, but it
- 5 -
allows a useful visualization. DNA replication working like a one-way zipper is
not a perfect analogy, but so long as you understand where it overlaps, it becomes
a useful one.
The Strategy to Learn Faster
Learning faster doesn’t need to be a trick to work well. It simply means
recognizing what is actually going on when we reach a new level of insight and
finding tools to help us reach those stages consistently.
In this article I described learning as being three stages: coverage, practice and
insight. This gives the false impression that these three occur always in distinct
phases and never overlap or repeat.
In truth you may find yourself going between them in a loop as you successfully
peel down to deeper layers of understanding. The first time you read a chapter you
may get only superficial insights, but after doing practice questions and building
intuitions, you may go back and read for deeper understandings.
Applying the Drilldown Method for Non-Students
This process isn’t one you need to be a student to apply. It also works for
learning complex skills or building expertise on a topic.
For skills like programming or design, most people follow the first two stages.
They read a book teaching them the basics, then they practice with a project. You
can extend that process however, and use the Feynman technique to better lock in
and articulate the insights you create.
For expertise on a topic, the only difference is that, prior to doing
coverage, you need to find a set of material to learn from. That could
be research articles or several books on the topic. In either case,
once you’ve defined the chunk of knowledge you want to master, you can
drill down and learn it deeply.
- 6 -
