Understanding How To Understand
If you are anything like me, you often find yourself pulling your hair out trying to remember the last article you read, tutorial you followed, or video you watched about some new frameworks or code snippet you wanted to use for your next project. You’d dig through your search history, page after page but you just can’t seem to find the same thread. Feeling disappointed and altogether helpless, you then start reading another “How to” guide just to forget it again in a couple of weeks or months.
I recently realized that I shouldn’t blame this on my “short-term memory”, or on how many tutorials there are on the same tool or technique. Rather, I lacked understanding of the material which prevented me from retaining the information. Here I will break down the 3 steps that I’m taking to learn and retain information, and save myself even when I forget.
1. Learn and return (to learn more)
Everyone has different styles of learning. Some can finish a book in a few hours and some can watch tutorial videos at 2.5x speed. It is important to find out how you learn best because it has the power to make dull material interesting and vice versa when presented in an incompatible format. Resources come in so many different ways now that it may become difficult to find the best way for you to learn. However, you should be able to identify over time if you can stay concentrated longer from watching animated guides or reading boring black texts on a white background. As you can probably tell, I’m heavily biased towards visual learning because I can’t keep my eyes open reading books or articles for more than 15 minutes. Like the old saying “the best workout is the one you do”, you should find a way to learn that makes you want to keep learning.
2. Teach and preach
It’s probably not the first time you see or hear this but learn by teaching. If you don’t want to take my word for it, take Wikipedia’s! To be brutally honest, the main reason why I wanted to write this article is to remind myself of this exact point. Teaching something forces you to verbalize your thoughts, form opinions and conduct more research on the topic. When you become the teacher, you’ll feel the need to prepare for questions. This allows you to ask yourself questions that you may or may not have answers for, which leads to doing more research on the topic. With all of the online platforms available to the public, you won’t need to find a friend or family member to bother them about something that they may not have an interest in. You can easily start a blog post on Medium, WordPress, LinkedIn, or you can even film yourself talking to the camera if that’s your preferred approach. You don’t even necessarily have to post it because remember, it’s the process of teaching that really helps you understand, but it can only help you more by hearing feedback from others (aka students). Again, teaching is a great way to help you learn where it replaces all of the “I don’t know”s with “This is because”s.
3. Use and abuse
What’s 1+1? You are probably mocking me for asking such a stupid question. It’s 2 of course! Now ask yourself how many times have you seen that problem growing up? Is it really that much harder than answering is {} truthy or false in javascript? Some of you may think it’s just as easy because you’ve been asked so many times during interviews or have used it so many times in your javascript applications. This is exactly my point, every new trick or skill you learn is always difficult to use or apply at first, but with enough repetition, seeing all of the variants of results, you will eventually become a master, and performing the task becomes second nature. It may be obvious when it comes to coding, you may find yourself copy and pasting the same snippet over and over again until one day you decide it’s probably easier to just write it out from your memory than finding the snippet. Keep practicing and using the knowledge until it becomes yours, and combining it with learn by teaching, it’ll be (nearly) impossible for you to forget.
What if I still can’t remember?
Of course, there will be some information that is more complex than others. No matter how much you practice, it’s difficult to remember 100 line snippets or what Dijkstra’s algorithm is. Remember the blog post you wrote or the videos you recorded? Whether they are published or in your drafts folder, you get to become your own student. No one can understand yourself better than yourself, now you can easily understand the material in the same way you understood it the first time. You’ll also never need to search through hundreds of posts and videos on the same topic again because you have a shortcut to yours! Hmm maybe this is why there are so many resources on the same topic 🤔
Conclusion
Learning is hard. Frankly, the more you learn the harder it becomes. These steps made me a better learner and really made learning more enjoyable. I hope this can help you too, even if it’s just a little. 😄
