See One, Do One, Teach One
When my wife attended medical school, there was a simple mantra about learning that I thought was very powerful: “see one, do one, teach one.” To really understand how to perform a given procedure you must first see one done, then do one yourself, and finally, teach someone else to do one.
Too often we think of learning as stopping at the first step. We read a book, take a class or watch an online video and think that we have “learned” something. This may be true for purely informational matters (did you know Mars is over 33 million miles from Earth at its closest point — more than 125 times as far away as the Moon). But, this is a poor route to truly understand a topic or develop a skill. At this point you have only really seen one — and true learning requires doing and teaching.
I have tried to apply this concept in my own life as I try to continue to learn and develop new skills. It is the primary reason I still write code and recently entered my first Kaggle competition. For me, these are the “do one” portions of the process. I did not expect to win the competition (though, I thought getting into the top XX% wasn’t too bad…), but I knew that I would never really understand machine learning until I actually built a model myself — and I certainly learned a lot from that process. Cleaning data, engineering features, tuning hyper-parameters, etc all make sense on a certain level when you hear about them — but actually having to perform each task is another ballgame altogether.
The last part of the puzzle is probably the hardest to do in normal life — after all, we must content in most settings with the twin difficulties of not being knowledgeable enough to teach something and not having someone nearby interested in learning it. I’m fortunate in that my kids (and sometimes my wife) are interested enough in things I am trying to learn to at least pretend to be interested in a lesson from me. Lunch and learn sessions at the office are another great way to get an opportunity to teach some people about a topic of interest r a skill you have.
And while the “teach one” part of the process may be the most difficult, in many ways it can also be the most rewarding. It has certainly been my experience that collecting and organizing my thoughts well enough to pass them along to another human being is much harder than simply performing a skill I know. It takes another level of thoughtfulness and preparation which typically stresses your own understanding. And that’s before your “student” asks questions for which you are woefully unprepared. If you can find a way to teach a skill that you are learning to others, I highly recommend it — nothing will help you gain a better understanding of the topic yourself.
Originally published at https://jeffkeltner.com on July 31, 2019.
