When we learn a new skill that is immediately applicable and start using it every day, then it will become instinctive long before we forget about it.
Other times, we learn something (through reading, training, or experience) that we recognize as valuable to ourselves or others, but we won’t get to apply it frequently enough to convert it to instinct.
How can we store the things we learn so that we have access to them when we need them?
If you have a small strawberry farm that you run with your family and you take in a huge harvest, some strawberries will be eaten right away, some will go to waste, and some you will preserve – by freezing, or turning into jam, or canning.
Like with fruit, if we don’t take steps to preserve what we’ve learned, some of it will spoil – forgotten – before we can apply (“eat”) it.
Learning in public is a way of preserving our new knowledge: you package it up in a way that keeps well.
This post talks about the value of writing in public about what we’re learning.
Boil it down // summarize
When making jam, you prepare the berries (remove stems, bruised sections, etc.) and boil them down to cook and thicken them.
In a similar way, writing forces us to simplify and summarize what we’ve learned. Editing helps us remove interesting but non-essential points and produce memorable summaries.
Add sugar // capture the context
The other main ingredient in jam is sugar, which is a necessary part of the chemical reaction that preserves the jam.
When we learn, we mix the new knowledge with our experience and context so we can make sense of our learning. When we take notes from a lecture or while reading a book, we tend to emphasize the new knowledge or ideas, but don’t take much time capturing our experience or context. (Why would we? We’re here to learn something new, not reflect on something we already know.)
When our future self or someone else looks at our notes, they will be hard to understand if we don’t remember or know the context and experience that filled in the gaps in the new knowledge.
By writing for others, we force ourselves to ask “what do I know that readers wouldn’t know?”. This discipline of empathy helps us think about what other information is required for our notes to be sensible to others or to our future selves.
Give the jam away // get feedback
After a big jamming session, you might have enough jam to share. Writing, on the other hand, is not diminished by sharing; we can copy it for free.
After we write, if we know of anyone who would be interested in what we’ve written about, then we can get feedback for free. They read what we’ve written, and learn something – it benefits them. And then they ask questions or give feedback, that helps us refine our understanding (“boil down the jam”) or identify missing context (“add more sugar”) so that the thing we learned is well preserved.
Learning in public
This idea has been written about by others under the title “learning in public”. There is practical advice that you may find helpful in this post: Learn In Public: The fastest way to learn.