The four steps
- 1
Write the concept at the top of a blank page
Just the name. Nothing else. Close the book, close the tab, close the slides.
- 2
Explain it as if to someone who has never heard of it
Plain language. No jargon you cannot immediately define. Aim at a bright twelve-year-old, not a peer — a peer lets you hide behind shared vocabulary.
- 3
Find the exact point where you stalled
This is the step. Everyone does steps one and two and then feels good and stops. The stall is the entire payload: it is the boundary of your understanding, located precisely, in under ten minutes.
- 4
Go back to the source, but only for that
Not a re-read of the chapter. Read the specific thing you could not say, then start again from a blank page.
Why jargon is the enemy
Technical vocabulary lets you produce fluent, confident, examinable-sounding sentences that mean nothing to you. "The enzyme allosterically modulates the pathway" can be written by someone who could not tell you, under any pressure, what it would look like if it stopped doing so.
Forcing yourself into plain words removes the hiding place. There is nowhere to put the gap. This is also why explaining to an actual person is so brutal and so useful — they interrupt at exactly the sentence you were hoping to slide past.
Where it fits with everything else
Feynman is a *comprehension* tool. It tells you what you do not understand. It does not, on its own, make you remember — that is a different problem, solved by retrieval practice and spacing. Use Feynman to find the holes, fill them, and then card the result.