202306031148 Status: #the-standards #lam-zett Tags: #process # The Feynman Technique [[05 Love + Money/Richard Feynman]] was a 20th century Nobel-winning physicist known for his diagrams, lectures, bongo-playing, philandering and originality. They** called him "The Great Explainer." Feynman is quoted as saying "What I cannot create, I do not understand." He believed that the only way to work something out yourself is to have a firm understanding of each step of the reasoning involved. Once, when asked to explain a particular behaviour of sub-atomic particles, he told his colleague "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, > "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it." > — [[05 Love + Money/Richard Feynman]] #quote This approach to learning is what we now call the Feynman Technique: 1. Identify a subject you want to learn about 2. Attempt to explain it to someone who has no prior knowledge (like child). Avoid fancy lingo and pretentious terminology. And do it with brevity. Kids have short attention spans, places to be 3. Identify the gaps in your knowledge — the bits you struggle to explain 4. Research further, refine your explanation So why do we care? Because on some level, a brand is really just an explainer: a way of communicating something complex (say, a business) in a way that someone else understands. The level of understanding varies from person to person (audience) typically depending on: 1) what their motivations are for engaging in the brand (they might be an employee, a customer, an investor, or a competitor), and; 2) how familiar they are with the business specifically, or the product or service that business provides more generally (we codify this in a [[Sales Funnel]] or a [[User Journey]]). ** *Whoever the fuck is "They" anyway? --- # References -