The Easiest Way To Measure Your Understanding, Knowledge, And Wisdom — Deep Dive

If you cannot explain something in very simple terms, you do not understand it enough.

This is the basis of many techniques for learning. The Feynman technique (after the famous and brilliant physicist Richard Feynman) urges you to explain a concept like you would lecture on it. Active recall works the same way, by elaborating something in your own words to quickly learn. The Five-year-old test forces you to strip down your language too, having to ground the particular concepts in well understood phenomena.

Nonetheless, all of them stop you from hiding behind jargon and explaining yourself. Understanding a certain concept well comes down to how simple you can make it for yourself and others.

So how do you get your thinking clean and simple wisdom? By using first principles.

First principle thinking

Although it sounds very fancy and somewhat complicated, it is the opposite in reality. You can practice first principle thinking anytime. Four-year-olds are famous/notorious for doing this.

To get first principle thinking, you only need to know one single word, again and again, which is

“Why”