How to understand complex knowledge?
Lately, when I go to university, I consume too much knowledge and information, and it was tough to understand. Students at the university require reading more than 300 pages/week of documents (books, articles) with specialized terms, and not just reading, but really understanding the material. Although I love to study, sometimes I feel overwhelmed, and sometimes frustrated and sleepy when approaching multiple complex knowledge like that. So I question myself, where all of the problems come from?
The Blah-Blahmeter
The Blah-Blahmeter is an interesting chart from Dan Roam - author of the book "Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work" describes what influences you in the understand a knowledge.
Example
- No blad-blad: when I watch an easy-to-understand infographic video like Vox.com or Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
- Blad-Blad: When reading a book chapter with complex knowledge without background knowledge.
Power of hummingbirds
Imagine, in a dense forest, there are two living creatures, fox and hummingbird.
The fox: He sees the forest as clear, straight paths.
Hummingbirds: She looked from corner to corner of the forest to see its panorama and see the forest from above.
So how the hummingbird help the fox to find his way in the woods?
In other words, the Fox represents the analysis of a problem, and the hummingbird represents the synthesis and visualization of a problem. Both ways should go hand in hand to self-explain. For example, the hummingbird often looks too much overall, so it will not be as accurate and detailed as the Fox. And the Fox is very focused on finding his way and walking in the forest, but to go in the right direction in the dense forest, a hummingbird with a view from above is needed.
How to become a hummingbird?
Actually, this topic will be quite broad, and I will go into an in-depth explanation in the next posts, but here is an excellent video form Dan Roam that I found.
#WhatIlearntoday is a series of articles to record the knowledge I learned in a day. This knowledge is not the final version but will be updated and developed over time.