Master Learning By Teaching 📚 The Feynman Technique 📝 Using Obsidian

The Feynman technique is one of the best ways to learn effectively. You pick a topic; you teach it as simply as possible, for example, to a 12-year-old you. And as you go through this explanation, you identify gaps in the explanation where you struggle to explain it simply. Finally, you improve your explanation by filling in the gaps with research and reflection and then go back to the explanation step. Richard Feynman, who the Feynman technique is based on, was a theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate who worked on the Manhattan Project when he was in his early 20s.

Feynman has become well known as an original thinker, someone who approached the world differently, questioning everything as he worked to change our understanding of reality. Not only was he a great scientist, but he spent a large amount of time teaching people physics to the point where he became known as the "great explainer." He had a simple technique that enabled him to push the bounds of physics while maintaining the ability to teach beginners. The Feynman technique.

Hello, my name is Callum, also known as WLS, and welcome to today's video on the Feynman technique. Using the Feynman technique in my YouTube videos, I've identified a gap in my explanations. You, the audience, are looking for me to explain more in depth how I'm actually using Obsidian in my workflow, how I'm using my note-taking software along with artificial intelligence to practically learn new things and then express them to people. In this video series, rather than merely explaining how to use a tool, I'm going to use the Feynman technique to explore the Feynman technique itself and other topics. I'll show you how I'm using Obsidian to expand on my natural trains of thought with the notes I took to make this video. As I follow these thoughts and ideas, I'll outline them in my publications for future YouTube videos, my newsletter, and my digital garden.

I plan on using the Feynman technique in this YouTube series to both learn and teach effectively as I explore emerging technology and the deeper levels of what it means to be human in a world of AI. I want to be able to continue to distill and synthesize my thoughts into original thinking, but then express them to you in a way that it can make sense. As I do this, I'll show you the tools that I'm using, like Obsidian and Notebook LM, to complement each other, where I can take original notes, expand on my ideas using artificial intelligence, and generally just deal with the information overload we're all experiencing on a day-to-day basis in a healthy way. The Feynman technique is one of the most sustainable and best ways I've found to learn complex topics effectively. So today, I wanted to explore it more in depth, taking a look at Richard Feynman, the person who the technique is named after, but also how this can connect to other topics that deal with information and overload as we continuously move into the realm of the unknown, a realm of uncertainty.

As with technology and everything that's been happening lately, things are changing more rapidly than ever before. Before I knew what it was, I had already been using this Feynman technique to learn about emerging technology, the creator economy, and what makes us human, publishing almost 200,000 words in my newsletter, Recalibrating. A core reason why I chose the name Recalibrating is because I know that there's always more to learn every day. I can iterate and improve on who I am, working towards being the best version of myself if I make the time to do so. As an educator, I also want to make the best videos possible for you. This is one of the main reasons I quit my job as an intellectual property lawyer and a patent agent because, rather than focusing on just a couple clients over months, I wanted to be able to reach a broader range of people and help teach them a lot of the complicated concepts that I've been spending a lot of time researching and developing and synthesizing into my explanations of the world.

I started my reading list with the book *Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character* because I find Feynman to be one of the most inspiring people in the last 100 years. I first came across his work in my undergrad when I was studying nanotechnology engineering and seemed to continue coming across his name when I research education and learning. For example, I came across him in the book *How to Take Smart Notes*, which gets deep into the Zettelkasten method and how you can use note-taking to improve your thinking and output, and also in the book *Building a Second Brain* by Tiago Forte, which talks about Feynman's favorite problems and how he used curiosity as a way to drive his research, learning, and teaching.

If you're interested in learning more about the tools that I use in this video, like Obsidian and Notebook LM, I recommend checking out this playlist here where I walk through all of the basic features of Obsidian, expanding it into more complex topics and how I organize my system for emerging insights, which you'll see a little bit more as I walk through this video today. So I recommend checking out that video if you want to learn how to use the tool because this is more me showing you how I actually use it in a practical workflow. And you'll notice as I go through this that I have specific templates for different node types, like atom, molecule, and alloy. This is my version of the Zettelkasten system, which is one of the most productive note-taking systems of all time. So if you're interested in learning more about molecular Zettelkasten, I have a video that goes more in depth on that. Also, I've made this system available as a starter kit for Obsidian molecular Zettelkasten for my paying YouTube members. So if you're interested in supporting me for making these videos and want to help me be able to continue making these videos in the future, then please consider checking out my membership.

All right, let's dive into the Feynman technique. So, as part of a more practical series on Obsidian, I thought it would be helpful for me to show you how I take new notes in the form of atoms, how I connect those notes, those atoms, to other concepts and ideas and inspirations to form molecules, and then how I thread those molecules into uh, what I call an alloy, which is like a note sequence. And the goal of the alloy is to be expressed in public. You can see here in the Feynman technique note that I have a property here for DG publish. So what that means is that this note has already been published to my digital garden. If I go to my digital garden and type in Feynman, you can see that this is here on my website. I've updated this note a little bit, but you can see that there's only really one connection here. So my goal here is to try and expand the number of connections that I have coming out from the Feynman technique. So one way to quickly see this is you can click depth, and you can start to see here how all the different notes connect to one another, but it's a little messy and there's not specifically related to the Feynman technique; most of this is going to my digital garden code block. So let's go back to Obsidian and take a look.

Okay, so I've added a couple topics here: learning and teaching, because both of these are related, and I had previously added a reference link to the Feynman technique. And the goal of this reference link is to be able to quickly show me exactly the best form of that particular concept that I have seen before. So let's see what it looks like. Usually when I go to a blog post like this, I like to quickly check to see if there's any graphic, which there's not, but it does have a pretty clear layout of the topic: choose a subject, like a topic; identify the specific knowledge area; and then pretend to explain this knowledge to a child, speaking aloud; act as though you're explaining this knowledge or theory; use simple words; come up with analogies; and then cover the necessary details. As you go through and this process in and of itself will cause me to reflect on gaps. When there's a moment that I struggle to explain something, that's probably an indicator that I need to go into that particular aspect, that facet of the topic, a little bit more in depth. As you go through in research, then you can go back and try and explain it to the person again, and you just continuously go through that cycle. So I framed this as: select a subject and identify learning goals; pretend to explain this to a child, like 12-year-old me; identify knowledge gaps and areas that were difficult to explain; and then recalibrate the explanation.

Okay, so I have a bit of an idea here where I want to go more in depth and connect some of these concepts to other topics that I've been researching in the past. I feel as though I was able to explain that fairly well; I understand the concept, but I think the best way to really learn how to use the technique is to start using it in specific examples. So I'm going to create a new note here called Leveraging the Feynman Technique, and I'm going to insert a template of an alloy. And this is where I'm going to kind of have a home base here where I want to take a couple different concepts related to the Feynman technique, and I want to thread them together into a sequence that could be, for example, a newsletter or this YouTube video. So if I start with the Feynman technique, I want to be able to connect this to something else. So if I reflect for a second and start taking some notes, to me the Feynman technique is about identifying gaps in knowledge, that's the sole purpose of it. So if what I'm doing with the Feynman technique is trying to identify gaps in knowledge, what that means is I'm effectively trying to recognize what it is that I don't actually know. This is a very difficult thing to do because not knowing what we don't know is like being in the void or the fog without being able to see ahead of us.

Okay, so now what I would do is I would try and think of a list of other concepts that come to mind. So right away what I have with this is this is a circular technique. So if I go to Google for a second and I search for the Feynman technique, you can see that the examples here are circular. So I find that when you start to think of different mental models on how things can be connected together, if you start to recognize the shape of the mental model, for example a circular one, you can start to then layer different mental models on that concept, on that original one, in a way that starts to make a lot more sense. So what this really makes me think of—just going to copy this image here—go back to Feynman technique and add it to my vault. So I have a plugin that's called Auto Rename Note, so every time I paste in a note it'll match the image name to the note title itself. So you can see here again this is what I was talking about with the circular element: choose a concept to learn; teach it to yourself or someone else; return to the source material if you get stuck; simplify your explanations; and create analogies. So what I'm trying to do right now with explaining the Feynman technique, to simplify this a little bit more, is to provide some other analogies. So what are potential analogies here? Well, the first one that comes to mind for me is the hero's journey, and that looks like this. As you can see, I also have this one published on my vault. I have a reference to Joseph Campbell, who's the person that came up with the hero's journey, and the topic is storytelling, and this is also an atom; this is a singular concept note. So you can see here there's this circular aspect, the cyclical nature of storytelling where the hero leaves the known to venture into the unknown, experiencing a sense of ecod death before returning back to the known as the changed. So I already had a note on this, and that's where it's kind of nice because as I'm going through and trying to write this alloy, this newsletter or this YouTube video, I can start to connect the concepts that I've already included in my vault without having to rewrite anything. In fact, I could even just go like this and embed the entire hero's journey note here, and that way I don't need to actually write anything new. So I'm going to do that here for a second with the Feynman technique as well, and now I have both of these graphics that just get pulled in from my existing note, and you can see that they're kind of similar. The hero here has a call to adventure; they want to explore something; there's a sense of curiosity; a need to change; so they cross the threshold, and they begin learning; they explore the topic; they begin going into the unknown; they cross that threshold. As they go through, they come across helpers, people that they talk to that help them or that they help, and then they have a mentor that helps teach them. So this whole element here is very related to learning; I would say there's new experiences happening in the unknown, and by taking time to connect with the mentor and the helpers, they're able to have some form of revelation; they're able to have some thought process, something that changes their mind, and then that causes a transformation in them. So this is kind of like in the Feynman technique where, by teaching it to someone else, you realize where you get stuck, and then that helps you identify new ways to explain something; there's a transformation in the teaching method; then you can take that transformation, and you go back to the known region, back to the area where you think you understand the explanation, and then you can explain it to the person again. So here you start off by going into the unknown to learn something; you try teaching it to someone else; you realize where you get stuck; and then you have a revelation on how to explain it in your research so that you go back to the known area and try explaining it again, and you just continuously repeat that cycle. So that seems like a good connection for me to make between these two topics, to connect these two, and that could be the first molecule. And a molecule is a linked concept note that I talk more about in molecular Zettelkasten, and I'll try and come up with a name. Let's call it Cyclical Nature of Learning and Teaching. So I can open that in a new note, insert a molecule, and then share my insight, which this is my template here, and you can see that this just moved automatically to the molecule vault. And let's see, let's see. I'll quickly summarize this. So effectively what I did here is I said there was an analogy between the Feynman technique and the hero's journey, so that was including some supporting atoms and some connections, and this is a linked concept because I took two atoms; I took both the Feynman technique and the hero's journey, and I linked them together with this insight of the mental model that's a cycle, a circular mental model. But as I'm writing this, I realize that there's a key element here of they realized what they didn't know in the first place. So let's go back to Leveraging the Feynman Technique for a moment; we now have a molecule here, and let's change this to atoms. Now what this is really making me think of is really just the concept of the unknown and what it means to not know something. So the goal of the Feynman technique is to try to improve learning and understanding while teaching someone else, so there's an expression component of it that's required, but there's also an awareness component of it. Once you get stuck, you have to recognize that you're stuck and then go back to the source material to simplify the explanations and create analogies. So this reminds me of the Uncertainty Matrix, and I realize I actually haven't created a note here, so this is a good example to show you how I make an atom. So this is a concept I came across a little while ago, and let's open that in a new note, insert the atom template, and I know that I have another note in here. You can see here it was just moved to the atom vault, and this is the Uncertainty Matrix which I saw as I was writing this out. As I was creating the Uncertainty Matrix note, I saw that I had a PNG file here, so let's embed that, and perfect. This is the Uncertainty Matrix that I was thinking of. This I first came across with Nest Labs by An L Lum, and you can see I already have a reference for that author here, who is An L. So I have another mental model, and while this one isn't exactly a circle, it's not exactly cyclical, it does kind of remind me of a cycle because what we have here is that we have different types of knowns and unknowns; this is what makes it a matrix. So what this effectively does is it goes through the different permutations that we have with knowns and unknowns. So if we have a known known, we know what we know, which means that we don't really need to do anything because this is already explicit knowledge that we contain. However, if we know that there is something we don't know, we're aware of the fact that we don't know it; that forms a knowledge gap. So this is what I've been talking about with the Feynman technique: we want to be able to identify knowledge gaps. However, before the knowledge gap comes into existence, before we're aware of that knowledge gap, it probably starts off as a blind spot. If I'm explaining a topic to someone and I think I know exactly what I'm talking about, I probably am pretty confident that I know what I'm saying, and I don't think that I have blind spots. It's not until I begin explaining this concept to someone else that I begin identifying the blind spots, and once I recognize and become aware of the blind spot, effectively that turns something into a known unknown; I'm aware of what I don't know; I know what I don't know. So that converts a blind spot into a knowledge gap; then I can go do research and explore that knowledge gap to try and fill it in and convert that into a known, into explicit knowledge. So let's go back to the Feynman technique alloy for a moment, and this would be another molecule where I'm now linking the Feynman technique with the Uncertainty Matrix. Let's call that one Reducing Uncertainty Through Teaching. I'll make a new note, insert as a molecule, and the insight here is that allows for a reduction of uncertainty by converting unknown unknowns, AKA blind spots, into known unknowns, AKA knowledge gaps.

Okay, so basically my summary of this is that teaching provides a mechanism through which blind spots can be identified, which is one of the hardest parts of reducing the unknowns in the uncertainty matrix. By definition, a blind spot is something you're unaware of. So what this makes me think of, and this is another concept I got from Anord Lum, is the concept of metacognition. Let's open that because I already have a note, and I have a ChatGPT summarization of this, so I'm not going to look at that for a moment. And I actually wrote about this concept in one of my newsletters, believe it was number eight; this one is entitled Creating Income Without Burnout. Perfect. Y, and this is where I had already written about avoiding burnout. So what's nice is I don't necessarily have to go back and rewrite anything; I can just take this section of my newsletter, what I've already created, and I can just add this as my understanding into my Obsidian vault. So I'm going to copy that image and then paste it here, and you can see it's entitled Metacognition, and this again shows a few elements of what I had just been talking about: we have metacognitive experiences, which is awareness; and when I was talking about the Uncertainty Matrix, if you don't know what you don't know, you're in a blind spot, which is another way of saying that you don't have awareness. So metacognition is a framework that literally means thinking about thinking or above thinking, and the goal is that you have different types of metacognitive abilities: you have metacognitive knowledge, regulation, and experiences. So you can, by paying attention to what's going on in your life, you can become aware of your thoughts and your feelings through experiences, and then you can regulate that thinking about your own thinking to become more deeply aware of what's happening through planning, monitoring, and evaluating; and while you're doing this, you begin to generate knowledge; you begin getting different types of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge, which I'm just going to group together as knowledge generally for the moment. So effectively, by having experiences where we become aware of our thoughts and feelings or we just generally increase our awareness, we're able to better regulate that.

Awareness through planning, monitoring, and evaluating so that we can increase our knowledge; so that, to me, sounds actually a lot like the Feynman technique. So let's add another molecule here. Let's call this one "Expressing understanding through teaching improves metacognition." Let's create a new note molecule, and let's label the insight here: "Metacognition develops through an increasing awareness of thoughts and feelings. The more awareness increases, the better we're able to plan to increase that awareness even further." It ends up being a flywheel effect; helps increase awareness of the unknown, of what we don't know we don't know, aka the opposite of awareness.

By leveraging metacognition frameworks and expressing our own understanding to others, we're better able to identify the gaps in knowledge and make a plan to bridge those gaps. So my thought here is that metacognition provides an easy framework for understanding how we can increase knowledge through planning, monitoring, and evaluating. That also sounds kind of like a circular system here, where we plan to do something—for example, teach—we then monitor the feedback that we get from teaching, and then we evaluate that feedback to help create a plan to better generate knowledge that would have filled the gap of that feedback in the first place. So perhaps this is more actually related to the regulation side of things. So I'm going to modify that to specifically point to metacognition regulation. There we go. Now we have three molecules; we have three linked concepts that are all tied to the Feynman technique. I'm going to add our graphics in here because I'm personally a very visual learner, so I like that I'm able to just embed these notes very easily.

So now that I've walked through a couple concepts related to the Feynman technique, connecting them to the uncertainty matrix, the hero's journey, and the concept/framework of metacognition, what I'm realizing is that so far what I've been mostly focused on is the identification of the gaps—the knowledge gaps—which is a key part of the Feynman technique, but now I want to take a step back and look at it a little more broadly and consider a more fundamental element of it, which is expression. I have to actually take the concept, the topic that I've been exploring, and express it to someone else. I have to have a conversation—either with myself, which could be through journaling, through writing—a conversation with another person, or I need to publish it in some format that will enable feedback, because the feedback here is the key part. If someone's confused, they're going to be asking questions; asking questions will force me to rethink the concept in a different light, to recalibrate my perspective, and then try to answer it, to fill in that knowledge gap of someone else. If I'm unable to do that, that's the key indicator that I need to go back to the drawing board and do a little bit more research.

So now let's consider the actual expression part a little bit more. I explore a curiosity, a topic, a question, a problem—something that I want to learn—then I write down everything I know about it. I try to formulate my understanding and then express it to someone else. Only upon that expression am I able to begin identifying those knowledge gaps that I talked about. So in a way, what we can think of is I'm taking something in my brain—my thoughts, my ideas, what I think my understanding is—and I'm able to actually encapsulate, to package those thoughts, which could be all over the place, into one of the most powerful forms of communication: language. I can actually use words to force myself to confine what I think I know into what I actually know by putting it down on paper or by having a conversation with someone else. That's actually a big part of what I'm trying to do with this YouTube channel. I want to take what I think I know and then express it to you in a way that I can understand it better from teaching, and hopefully you can understand it better from being taught it. So really, this hones in on the concept of using words and language as a key element of the Feynman technique.

So as I'm saying this, I'm thinking that there are two main ways of doing this: I can do it synchronously, where I'm actually talking to someone and having a back-and-forth conversation, or I can do it asynchronously—not at the same time—and this is actually a really powerful way of doing it, because this allows us to reach more people across the whole world, in different time zones. I don't have to actually be sitting right beside someone having a conversation, or on a phone where we sync up. Instead, I can be posting something on social media, I can be writing a newsletter, or creating a YouTube video, or publishing to my digital garden, and that allows someone else to, whenever they feel like it, come by, read it, and then potentially give me feedback. So in a sense, the teaching part doesn't have to happen at the same time that the feedback happens. For example, when I publish YouTube videos, often weeks or months later someone will ask a question, leave a comment that really causes me to think, and I realize, "Oh, you know what, I didn't understand this as well as I thought I did," because it left open the door for that question that I wasn't aware of. So by people providing comments in my YouTube channel, I'm actually able to go back and then revisit these concepts, explain my thoughts a little bit better, and then give them an answer, either by sending them a link to my digital garden or directing them to another video that I've made that tried to fill in that knowledge gap. So asynchronous communication is a really powerful way to boost our ability to use the Feynman technique in the modern world because we have the internet; we're able to express in so many different ways. All we have to do is actually take the time; we have to be aware of the expression that we're putting out there and try to incite some kind of conversation back and forth to generate the feedback that helps us identify those knowledge gaps so that we can go back and revisit those concepts and hone our explanations.

As I'm saying this again, this what comes to mind is the CODE technique from *Building a Second Brain* by Tiago Forte: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express. With the Feynman technique, we go and explore our curiosity and take notes on it; we capture, then we organize those thoughts and distill it into an explanation—the first iteration of the explanation—then we have to express that explanation to someone else and use that to identify other information that we need to then capture and then fit back into the process. So the CODE technique ends up being kind of circular in the same way that the Feynman technique is, but it requires that expression step, and that's what most people struggle with. So many people just take notes, and they just leave them on their computer or on their phone, and they never do anything with it, and that's totally fine, but we live in an age where we have this ability to asynchronously communicate with so many cool people, and that's personally why I love the concept of a digital garden, because I'm able to write in Obsidian; I'm able to take these notes, and then I'm able to express them to my digital garden in a way that really helps boost my conversations with so many people. Because when I'm having a conversation about a complicated topic, instead of reiterating myself 100 times, I can just direct them to my condensed thinking on that topic and then get their feedback on that form of expression so that I can recalibrate and iterate that explanation better in the future and update my digital garden or make a YouTube video.

So effectively, what I'm getting at here is I think that there's power in learning in public; there's power in sharing our knowledge with other people to give them a stepping stone so that they can come into that knowledge faster themselves. I think with a lot of education, people get really bored with a lot of topics because our school systems are so standardized and so uninteresting in many ways. So if we're able to find things that genuinely inspire us, genuinely spark our curiosity, and we're able to express that passionately on the internet—through digital gardening, through newsletters, through social media, through conversations with friends, through YouTube videos, through podcasts, anything—then we're better able to expand the educational ability of our entire species, and I think that's a really underrated element of the internet, and it's something that we're seeing a lot more growth in in recent years, especially during the pandemic, where a lot of people turned to YouTube to get their access to education and learning new things. But as I say that, it's also very important that we improve the credibility of the internet, that we don't spread false information, and that we actually take time to research topics in depth, and that's again what I'm trying to do with my Obsidian vault, with my digital garden, and my YouTube channel. I have a video on Zotero, which allows me to bring in PDFs from published papers, and that's just another way that, by linking the references to all of this information in my digital garden and in my Obsidian vault, I'm able to maintain credibility across my vault for when I publish this information. Okay, so now that I took that time to share the thoughts that were off the cuff, coming to mind here just from trying to explain it to you, where I was taking all the important elements of the Feynman technique, identified a few more concepts that I want to add into my alloy, into my published format here in my newsletter, and that's the CODE technique—Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express—and the power of asynchronous versus synchronous explanations and publication to the internet.

Okay, so like I just said, there's a couple more topics here that I want to add in, which is CODE—Capture, Organize, Distill, Express—and really the important element of the expression phase. So that would be synchronous. You can see here I have the concept of a digital campfire, which is what I was calling my live podcast that I was doing, like a Twitter Space, and that the goal of that is to have asynchronous conversation, and the second concept was synchronous versus asynchronous expression, and I clearly don't have a note on that, so let's quickly turn that into an atom. Okay, so now that I have a couple thoughts here, let's quickly add a topic. This would be communication, which I realize I don't have a note for, so let's create a new note. I'll open that, give it the tag #topic, and move that to my topic folder. Cool. So now I have a new atom there on synchronous versus asynchronous expression and the concept of CODE, and let's add another molecule. Let's call this one "Expression is an essential facet of identifying knowledge gaps." Create a new molecule. So this one is a bit of a mix of CODE and Feynman technique and synchronous versus asynchronous communication/expression. So as I'm going through and making this molecule—this linked concept note—if the insight doesn't instantly come to mind, I'll just relist the atoms that gave me that initial inspiration or insight in the first place to try and jog my memory, and if I need to further, I can say something like "expression = teaching in Feynman technique and internet enables async teaching." Cool. So that's kind of the insight here: If we try to identify knowledge gaps, unknown unknowns, aka blind spots on our own, we likely won't identify them very well or deeply because we're stuck in our own worldview.

By taking the time to express our understanding to others, attempting to teach them what we know and getting feedback from them on their confusion, we're able to validate a shared understanding of the world, or more importantly, identify a lack of shared understanding. In the modern age—okay, the internet age—we're no longer required to have synchronous conversation to generate this shared worldview. We can talk to more people anywhere in the world anytime by leaving asynchronous teachings/expressions that can be commented on by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Okay, so I'll try and distill this again a little bit: If we try to identify knowledge gaps, unknown unknowns, or blind spots on our own, we likely won't identify them very well or deeply because we already think we know what we know; by definition, we don't know what we don't know. By taking the time to express our understandings to others, attempting to teach them what we know and getting feedback from them on where they're confused, we're able to share an understanding of the world, get a validated understanding of the world, and also identify a lack of shared understanding where there are gaps and questions. And even better, in the modern age with the internet, we are no longer required to have synchronous conversations to generate this shared worldview. We can talk to more people anywhere in the world anytime by leaving asynchronous teachings or expressions that can be commented on by anyone, anywhere, anytime. And then finally, this asynchronicity allows us to explore many topics in parallel, and we can return back to them when we get a ping, a response, or comment from someone with either validation of the idea or questions about it.

So what's cool about this is if we go back now to the first phase of the Feynman technique—"Select a subject and identify learning goals"—to me this is effectively curiosity. If you're curious about different things, you can explore that curiosity and capture an element of that curiosity in a way that you can express it to someone else. This allows you to explore any number of topics; you don't have to niche into one specific thing. And actually, as I'm saying this, I realize that asynchronous expression enables nicheless topic exploration. This is kind of related to the previous one on asynchronicity allowing us to explore many topics in parallel, so I'm actually just going to cut that out of here because it seems like it fits better into this new molecule and supporting atoms. I can also say, as a connection based on the one I just typed in, "Expression is an essential facet of identifying knowledge gaps," because that's where this original insight started with. So connecting back to that previous molecule, we have this: Asynchronicity allows us to explore many topics in parallel, we're returning back to them when we get a response or comment from someone with a validation or a question. Rather than forcing the self to be curious about one specific topic, we can explore a broad range of genres, following our true curiosities of what we find most interesting in the world. Then we can cultivate each topic, each interest, in parallel as we feel inspired, which can prevent burnout because we don't have to force anything; we can instead just go with the flow. This also reminds me of the concept of flow, so I'm going to add that in, and also really nonlinear thinking, which is the whole point of Obsidian and why I called my Obsidian for beginners video "A Beginner's Guide to Obsidian Nonlinear Note Taking." So instead of forcing ourself to try and operate in any kind of linear path, we can instead begin exploring nonlinearity, which is where we start to have that truly original thinking.

Okay, so now that I've said all this, we have quite a few molecules, and honestly, I could just keep going for hours, but I realized that I'm kind of starting to get into, I think, a key other theme here. This has been revealed to myself as I go through and explain the Feynman technique and make the connections to all of these different topics: is that I focus a lot on the expression phase here, the teaching element, and the identification of those blind spots where we go through with the hero's journey and explore new topics, recognize our struggles, and then overcome them, only to come back and explain them again. But I realize, as I've gone through this, that I didn't really focus on "Choose a concept to learn"; I didn't focus on the first phase of the Feynman technique; I focused more on the teaching element. So before I get into the curiosity, the capture element, and the choosing a topic, I just want to quickly show you how I can turn these molecules into a note sequence. So, for example, I can take this—if I want to create a new section here and call it "Outline"—I can paste each of these notes, the molecules that I just included here, and I can begin embedding them. So if I go back to the beginning, I can talk about the Feynman technique and the hero's journey, and I already have some writing here. If I wanted to, I could go back and include the supporting atoms, for example, like the Feynman technique and the hero's journey—which, you know what, let's just do that for a second—and I'm able to include these in here in the molecule, and then if I come back to my outline, I now have this heading here, "The cyclical nature of teaching and learning," and then I have a summary of the Feynman technique along with the graphic and a summary of the hero's journey along with the graphic. So you can do this with all of the different concepts here. So let's go back to "Reducing uncertainty," and I have here "Uncertainty Matrix and the Feynman Technique." So I'm not going to include that one again, and I have metacognition, and then finally the new one here is CODE. So now I can go back to the beginning, and you can see here that I have all of these different molecules, which were my short-form writing, the connection of atoms, the connection of independent concepts, linking them together, and then by using the embed function, I'm able to just instantly create an outline using the writing that I've already done, and I can pull in the images, I can pull in the notes themselves to make it a lot easier for me to just, at a glance, understand what I was talking about. The final step would be to go through and fill in any gaps here, make some seamless connection with writing between all these different concepts, which, to be honest, I've kind of done already with this YouTube video. So when I go back and edit the YouTube video, I will go through and I'll fill in the gaps with writing and expand a little bit more, and then I'll send this out as a newsletter and publish it to my website and my digital garden. So this is just a really seamless way for me to go through and research what I'm already interested in and express it in a form that allows me to explore that research and explain it with to people, and then all I have to do is reuse the work that I've already done, the time and attention that I've invested into creating this note to build out a long-form piece of writing and a YouTube video. That's pretty cool.

So in the meantime, before I finish writing this newsletter, I don't have to wait until the newsletter is finished, until the long-form article is finessed and edited, until it's ready for publication. Instead, what I can do is I can just go back to my molecules here, and I can quickly insert "Digital Garden Template," and then I can press the publish button. And by pressing that singular publish button on here and going through and doing that for each of them, I can now press a single hotkey, which I have as command-shift-publish (command-shift-p), and I'm able to automatically publish those notes. Now they will appear right on my digital garden; there, they just published. So this is a very easy way for me to realize, "Okay, I'm not going to edit this for a few more days, maybe a week, but in the meantime, I've already expressed these concepts to people." I can take each of those molecules, and I can share them as a social media post, as a tweet, or on Foreaster or some other platform that is favorable for writing, or even as an Instagram screenshot, and I can start to get feedback from people on that particular concept, the linked concept of the molecule, before I finish out the entire article. This is a cool way to just publish as you go, to learn and build in public, which is the whole goal of me using the Feynman technique in the first place—to explore what I'm interested in and share it a lot more easily with less friction, so I don't overthink it, which I tend to do.

So now I realize, as I get to the end here, that uh, I have a lot to talk about still about expanding the Feynman technique, and in particular, I want to go back to the first concept, which is "Select a topic to research." How do you know what to dive into? How do you find what you're actually interested in? And again, Richard Feynman has another way of doing this; he has what's called Feynman's favorite problems, which are a way that he would select his favorite questions that he had ever come across in his life, and every time he came across something new that sparked insight or inspiration that made him feel excited about learning, he would see if he could…

Slot it into one of those 12 favorite problems. So, in the next video, I'm going to walk through that a little bit more to show you my current favorite problems, which I'm calling Cal's curriculum. Which are my favorite and most interesting things that I'm excited to dive into more with more of this video essay style. So I can continue showing you how I'm using Obsidian, how I'm using various tools like Notebook LM, and expanding on my thoughts and ideas and building my knowledge to fill in those blind spots while expressing it to you at the same time. So that we can all learn together in public.

I'll also touch a little bit more about what it means to select the form of expression as you go through these different topics. So that if you want to, you can begin connecting this to your digital identity and begin building out a brand, a personal brand of someone who works on these topics and researches them and is passionate about all of these different problems. If you're beginning to do this and express this to people to build out your digital garden or newsletter or social media or YouTube, then you're really already connecting to your digital identity. You're expanding on your digital presence in a way that allows you to begin building time, attention, and value in today's modern knowledge economy and Creator economy, which collectively is the attention economy.

So, if you're able to build out something that's causing someone to reflect on, to give you feedback and questions as part of the Fineman technique, they're spending attention on you. So together you can use this shared attention as a form of synergy to build your personal brand, which can help you also begin to monetize and to create your economy and potentially relieve some of the financial pressures that you're facing in life, if you're facing them. In effect, what I'm talking about here is an expansion on curiosity where you can get rewarded for taking the time to deep dive and research these topics. You can begin to potentially monetize your curiosity and the attention economy, which is what I'm doing with this YouTube channel.

I quit my job so that I could research these topics and help explain it to people. As a patent agent, my job was to distill incredibly complex information and express it as simply as possible. But rather than just using that skill to try and teach a few people at a time, I wanted to share that with as many people as possible because I find it more exciting and more fulfilling, and it's something I'm more passionate about: this learning in public and building in public. So YouTube is a perfect outlet for me. But the type of expression you're talking about that you might find interesting, it completely varies. The whole point here is that we can start experimenting, we can start iterating, and then you can recalibrate as you go to find what works best for you.

So if you're interested in learning a little bit more about what I just talked about there, I recommend checking out my digital identity video because it'll give a lot more context on this entire ecosystem and how what I'm doing with YouTube and the Fineman technique and learning in general fits into that system. If you're interested in learning more about Obsidian, I have a digital gardening playlist here, a personal knowledge playlist that goes a lot more into how I use this tool and set it up for emergent insights. So I recommend checking that out if you're interested in using Obsidian to keep track of your ideas and build out your digital garden or cultivate your knowledge in any way. Thanks again for watching, and I will see you in the next video, which I imagine will be on Fineman's favorite problems and how you can begin to develop your curiosity.