2025-09-27
Self-improvement and life advice tend towards triteness, cliché, or repetition, yet neither its authors nor its consumers ever seem to have enough of it. As it turns out, repeating and re-discovering ideas in different contexts and from different perspectives always brings some form of value. For example, identifying and rejecting bad ideas is as much a learning opportunity as absorbing new ones.
We often seek to broaden our knowledge by chasing new ideas, but neglect strengthening it by reinforcing and internalising what we already know. Learning by teaching is a practical example of this effect: Explaning and re-phrasing newly learned concepts requires of us an entirely different type of effort than consumption does. I would argue that this is a crucial step towards bridging the gap from memorization to understanding.
This type of knowledge reinforcement comes in many forms. Teaching is one of them, application is another. For strategic ideas such as this one, I build my understanding by writing this blog. For the specific programming skills I need to know as a developer, I apply newfound knowledge directly while developing and teach it by explaining it to other developers on my team. Note that, in order to explain an idea or concept to a colleague, I need them to be hearing it for the first time. Their understanding will grow deeper from hearing my perspective, independently of my own understanding.
Gaining knowledge is a one-time event. Building understanding and intuition is a continuous and never-ending process.
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