It’s a privilege & sometimes a challenge to live in a time & place where information is so easily available.
A privilege precisely because of the abundance of easily accessible facts and analysis. A challenge because information overload can just drown out understanding. Sometimes there’s so much to learn it’s hard to organise and absorb it in your own mind.
A while ago I stumbled onto a YouTube video of Richard Feynman giving a lecture and it’s just mesmerising.
Dr. Feynman won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1965 and was a genius among geniuses. Yet he had such a gift for getting across complex ideas to mere mortals that he was often known as “The Great Explainer”. One of the reasons he was such a great explainer was the way he went about gaining understanding himself.
Bill Gates talks about Dr. Feynman’s technique in this video…
There are many, many videos on the Interweb of Richard Feynman teaching. What a treasure trove. Wow!
If you want to practice Richard Feynman’s technique for gaining understanding here’s two and half minutes well spent…