Clear thinking versus memorization
Clear thinking versus memorization
I talk on here a lot about my desire to think more clearly as well as my desire to memorize more, and a quote in “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” did a great job of contrasting those two ideas.
In the book they say:
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing.
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
It’s a tough balance, but sometimes it’s easy to spot that mistake in others. I recently was on a call with another web agency where their developer was using quite a lot of jargon, but he was using it in ways that didn’t really make sense. It was clear he had memorized some concept but he didn’t really understand how the pieces of it fit together.
I spend a good bit of time in the /r/Anki subreddit (“Anki” is the memory tool that I use), and this very problem comes up in there fairly often. There are two suggestions that often come up to help counter this:
Create atomic cards. In short, make each card simply convey one fact or idea.
Related, learn the bigger concepts outside of Anki and only use Anki for the details.
In my case, I’ll learn a new idea or concept, and then simply use Anki to help with fine-tuning the memory. For example, after reading and studying the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, I built some cards to memorize the five dysfunctions (which happen to be “absence of trust”, “fear of conflict”, “lack of commitment”, “avoidance of accountability”, and “inattention to team results”).
Memorizing those individually is great, but without the context of the book behind them they’re of relatively little value. Learn the important concepts first, and then work on memorizing the details later.