The Feynman Technique

Teach the idea out loud to a blank page - wherever you stumble, you do not understand yet.

Key Concept

• Explain it simply to a blank page - the stumble marks the gap.
• Level 1: Like telling a younger kid how something works - when you cannot say it simply, you do not know it yet.
• Level 2: Explain an idea out loud as if no smart words exist - wherever you stall, that is the gap you still need to study.
• Level 3: Teaching-to-learn works because plain speech exposes holes that polished notes hide behind vocabulary.
• Level 4: Write one paragraph with no jargon - mark every stall and study that slice before you link the note.
• Level 5: A blank page is the honest audience - no jargon to hide behind; the stumble is the syllabus, same honesty check as Synthesis as a Goal before you publish.

  Level	Target	What it sounds like
  1	Grade 2-3 (age 7-8)	One concrete image, ~20 words, almost no abstract words
  2	Grade 6 (age 11-12)	Short analogy or story, plain words, no wikilinks
  3	Grade 10 (age 15-16)	Cause and effect, name the idea once
  4	College / early career	Actionable claim, tradeoffs hinted
  5	Expert practitioner	Nuance, edge cases, wikilinks, when it breaks

• A blank page is the honest audience - no jargon to hide behind.
• Teach-it-to-learn-it keeps evergreen notes honest before I link them.

Examples

• My kid asked how the fuse box works and I waved vaguely - explaining it simply showed I did not understand it well enough to fix anything.
• The new hire asked why we batch invoices that way and I stumbled mid-sentence.

Note Relationships