How to Understand Something

NOTE: When I say something, I mean a topic such as something you learn in a school. To understand something like skydiving or baking, you learn with experience (maybe a little reading first).

Knowing vs. Understanding

At this point in human history (the past decade or two), it has been getting easier and easier to pretend to understand something. Resources on the internet such as Sparknotes, Grammarly and especially artificial intelligence all efficiently throw information at people’s faces.

That may be good for a brief test or presentation, but I believe that truly understanding takes more.

The difference between knowing and understanding is that knowing a subject often allows someone to recite it; not understanding the deeper levels of the topic, but enough to pass the class. Mortimer J. Adler wrote “How to Read a Book”, and in it he said that these people are know better than broken records. Understanding, on the other hand, goes above and beyond. It means three things:

1. You spent time and effort learning the topic
2. You see the signifigance that topic has in the real world
3. You can explain its fundamentals to someone with little to no experience in said topic

Because there are three requirements to understanding something, they have a corresponding three steps.

Step 1: Read a Book

We said that the first requirement to understanding something is to put in effort with it (this is true for both school-topics AND experience, but we’re sticking with school).

The best way to spend time on a topic and get a lot out of it is a book. People have been learning out of books for a long time, and this is no coincidence. There are three reasons why books are the best way to spend time with a concpet:

1. They usually take time. The amount of pages in the book along with the content in each page both change the time it takes to finish. If it is a good book, you are forced to read the whole thing and power through.

2. They usually take effort. People don’t all read and write the same way, so certain books can be confusing to certain people. Moreover, a book can’t answer your questions for you; how much you get out of the book depends on you. Discovering everything this way yourself can take lots of work.

3. The author passes his knowledge to you. Though he may write funny, the author is still human, and he likely learned what he is writing about from another person. Books are perfectly designed for passing knowledge from generation to generation; the time and effort they take to read make it harder to glaze over a book then to glaze over a lecture or an AI overview. If you read the book, you have effectively finished a conversation with the author; in a sense, he fulfilled requirement 2 by teaching you.

Now you have spent some time and effort on a book (or multiple, depending on how deep you want your understanding to go), and you may be well on your way to understanding. But your grasp on whatever concept you’re learning is still confined to the pages of the book you read. To accomplish this next step, you’re going to have to touch some grass and spend time searching in the real world.

Step 2: Find Your Concept in the Real World

Books are great and all, but the ones that bring understanding almost always talk about our world; it is where everything happens, and it is where every idea is born. Therefore, one could say that the main purpose of reading a book (with information in it) is to act on what you read, and use it to change the world.

Unfortunately, because of how different a page is from a planet, simply reading the book isn’t enough to understand something, let alone accomplish the books purpose of being; you must find your concept being used in the real world.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• If you are trying to understand trigonometry, look at buildings or how the moon rotates about the earth and the earth the sun.
• If you are trying to understand Shakespeare, find the influence it has on media today
• If you are trying to understand nuclear reactions, go to a nuclear reactor.

There is a great reason you should be doing this: your mind only has so much space. Every day we learn new things, so our brain has to kick out what’s not important. The real world is important, and if your topic of study is in the real world, then it’s important too. You must make these practical connections in your head, so that the ideas stay in there easier.

You now understand the topic well. Now you have to prove it.

Step 3: Explain it to Somebody Else

Find someone who knows very little about what you’ve explored, and try to teach them the basics about it. This is what the author did for you, but instead of writing about it (though you could!) you are speaking. Doing this accomplishes two things:

1. It refreshes your memory on the topic and exercises your own understanding of it
2. It proves to yourself and to others that you clearly have your head wrapped around an idea

This is something that so many people do, from students trying to study to professors trying to get paid. The more you do this, the more you help others as well as yourself.