Concepts vs Facts

Let’s talk about concepts vs.

facts.

What’s the difference.

Well the difference and what I’m going to try and convince you in this lecture is that concepts are

more important than facts.

Now why is that.

Well you have facts which are just that they’re facts.

They’re things that you can just google and find out dates when somebody was born.

What’s the biggest company in North America.

These are all facts but facts are easy to Google.

We have Google for facts concepts.

On the other hand are hard to google for sometimes you can find them but concepts are mainly used for

your brain.

Remember when we talked about repetition vs.

a recollection when you recognize something when you repeat

something over and over.

It’s actually not as effective as recalling something for example when we highlight a textbook and you

go back and read through the highlights.

That’s actually not a good strategy.

A better strategy is to actually highlight a book and then go to each section and before you look at

the highlights try to recall what you learned in that section and then test yourself by reading over

the highlights then recognition versus recollection recollection is important in order to store something

in your long term memory.

You need to recall something not just recognize it and we learned again this topic of active learning

versus passive learning.

Active learning is this idea of testing yourself to improve that memory that recall and recall is one

of the best ways to really help your brain chunk information We chunk information by having these small

little chunks of knowledge and then connecting them to different things in our brain to create concepts.

How are things related to one another.

That’s what concepts are concepts are high level topics that give you context of what you learn of the

world around you.

Concepts are valuable.

Facts are cheap because anybody can learn facts right.

It doesn’t require any special power to retain facts but the people that get paid well in their careers

the people that are respected in their careers are people that have these chunks of knowledge that they

can connect the dots with and they have concepts available to them.

For example CEOs of big companies are able to solve difficult problems that don’t have an immediate

answer because they have different concepts that they can use these high level concepts are what they’re

able to do to connect different chunks of knowledge to form a novel solution.

This is why the trunk based knowledge way of learning is so important because you start with the Foundation

and the principles.

And once you have the foundation and the principles in place it’s a lot easier to learn these smaller

Leafs.

The smaller topics that often change and there’s many of and this is why whenever I learn something

new I always try to focus on the foundation and principle first being able to answer why am I learning

this.

Why is this topic important.

And asking that question just like a 5 year old does all the time.

Why this then why why.

That being able to connect the dots and ask why really forms this idea of building your concepts vs.

your factual knowledge and at the end of the day that’s what the Feynman technique teaches us in order

to have these concepts.

You should be able to teach it to somebody if you’re just understanding facts.

You wouldn’t be a good teacher if you understand concepts so and you can explain concepts then that’s

somebody that truly knows a topic.