Preface
Whether you’re a student or a lifelong learner, the following tips in this page will explain how to make something engaging for either yourself or others.
One of the best ways to know that we know something is through teaching it to someone else. Keeping the following principles and ideas in mind might help make things stick!
Curiosity Gaps
Opening a “curiosity gap” is a robust method to keep your attention on a topic you’re learning. This can also be helpful to articulate when teaching the thing you’re learning to someone else!
A “curiosity gap” can be a simple question or situation that inspires the listener to want to learn more. It offers them the pieces of a puzzle that are the most fascinating bits! This way, as they try to fit everything together, and go through the boring stuff, they’ll eventually “close the gap” and walk away with the satisfaction of solving the puzzle. This is innately more memorable.
Movement
While deep flow state work can make it easy for us to bang away at a keyboard for hours on end or stare at the screens until our eyes are sore, you can get much more out of your working sessions by adding little moments of movement. Get up, move around, put some interesting music on. I’d recommend dance. Interrupt the pattern every now and then.
10/22 Update - I wrote a little about this in a substack post.
Thoughtful Analogies
We’re really good at making associations. You can think of associative memory as attaching little hooks made from smaller bits of experiences and knowledge to hold something in place. Just like velcro!
Making analogies is the mind’s equivalent of this. The more connectivity you have to something and the more relevance that has in your problem solving or day to day life, the easier it becomes to internalize it.