Big Idea
Learning hard concepts using intuition.
Core principles
- Generate as many insights as possible
- insights are random thoughts to help understand a concept better
- eg. steps or examples to illustrate the concept
- Treat learning like problem solving
- Care about what you are doing lol
- Understand small pieces at a time
- Forget memorization
Method
- Start with understanding the big picture
- Pick a detail to learn
- Understand it context, eg. related to other details
- try to not go too deep into understanding all the smaller and smaller details
- Understand it by itself, diving deeper into the details
- Caring to be motivated to understand the detail
- Understanding the point, invent the piece from scratch
- What is this piece about?
- What does it do?
- What does it accomplish/describe?
- Try to solve the problem yourself, try to invent the piece for yourself
- If not problem, try to reverse-engineer the rule in examples
- Make the problem important to your brain
- Reinforce it (Try to invent it)
- Invent, look at step 4: point
- Practice, try to apply the concept whenever you can
- view the problem from multiple angles
- Explain the concept
- “Write it in your own words”
- Start from scratch and work your ways through the details
- Forces you to look for a simple way of viewing the concept
- Explore
- ask yourself dumb questions
- Examples: Goal gain random insights to get a deeper meaning
- change one part of the concept
- change one part of the problem
- See if some other solution applies
- Try to relate some of your past knowledge to the concept
- Question any intuitive assumptions you’re making
- Try to break the concept
- Look at the concept from different angles
- Talk to others and ask about experience/insights
- Ask why
- Think about the stuff that’s already intuitive to you and apply it
- Repeat 2-5 for other details