The Art of Understanding

Exploring the real secret to success

The real skill of success, the real thing that people are looking for to help them live happier, more enjoyable lives, is not more knowledge, which just gets more complex, but understanding. The ability to simplify complexity, to make it more familiar, less stressful, and more useful for their lives.

The world is dying for people who understand the different complexities of life, who can work their way through it, and give us a guiding light.

Understanding is not a passive term. It’s an active process. You can’t understand simply by seeing something. It involves making connections, imagining possibilities, reproducing results, staying focused, etc. The simple rule behind understanding is that if you can understand a skill or subject, you can perform it or explain it – over and over again in different ways and in different situations. Even more, if you can understand it, then you can help others understand it, too.

Indeed, when people talk about becoming more creative or more intelligent or more socially influential, what they really mean is that they want to become better at understanding these things. Mental and physical skill or sharpness is really skillful or sharp understanding (understanding can be both mental and physical).

As obvious as all this sounds, it’s not very obvious in practice. Most people, especially in our digital culture, are concerned with creating interesting, flashy, or weird effects, and not understanding how or why these effects work. Most people want to write good stories, but have nothing good to write about; make good films, but have nothing good to film about; create good songs, but have nothing good to sing about.

They fall in love with the effect, and not with the process of understanding it, and it’s this process that actually makes you creative, intelligent, and memorable. At the core of everything complex is something amazingly simple, something basic and fundamental, and if a complex work is any good, the simple thing that holds it up will be powerful, deep, and long-lasting.

So how do you become better at understanding? The following are four strategies to becoming better at understanding anything:

1. BREAK EVERYTHING DOWN AND BUILD IT BACK UP AGAIN

Pick something that you've always wanted to understand. It could be a subject, like Spanish or Physics; a skill, like wood-working or programming; a game, like chess or poker; or an art-form, like songwriting, painting, or poetry. It’s very important that it’s something you’re passionate about learning, since it’ll keep you motivated to keep learning it.

After you've picked the thing you want to understand, break it down to its basic components. Get a piece of paper (or a word processor) and list all the different elements that go into that making up that subject, skill, or art-form. For example, if you want to understand chess, you can break it down to the different pieces (Rook, Queen, King, Pawn, Bishop, Knight) and different moves these pieces can make.

After you've broken everything down, work to build everything back up again. Note the relationships between elements. Note also how changing one element changes another or changes the whole. In Physics, for example, with the famous equation by Einstein, E = mc^2, an increase in mass m means an increase in energy E. The one affects the other.

Breaking a skill or subject down to its basic components and then putting it back together again allows you to switch between looking at the forest and the trees, allowing you not only to see the bigger picture, but how the bigger picture works.

2. START AT THE END AND WORK BACKWARDS

Start with the end-result, the place where you want to be. If you want to write a novel, then the end-result would be “finished novel.” If you want to understand how to play chess, then the end-result would be “checkmate.” Very simple.

Now, concentrate on what that end-result looks like. What does a finished novel look like? It has characters and a story told through chapters. What does checkmate look like? It occurs when one player’s pieces threaten another’s king (check) in such a way that there is no way the king can escape the threat.

After you know what the end-result looks like, you can now work backwards to see how it can be produced. For the novel, the backwards process can go something like this: post-drafting (editing), drafting, and pre-drafting (planning, outlining).

Likewise, starting from the check-mate, we can proceed this way: end-game (where checkmate is achieved), mid-game (where each player alternatively manages his or her pieces against the other’s pieces), and opening-game (where the player with the white pieces start, and the player with the black pieces follows).

Working backwards from the end-result doesn’t mean that you necessarily will follow this process. You don’t have to write a novel by first pre-drafting, for example. Some people simply start writing and see what happens. Others may edit as they write.

The idea is simply to get a grasp of the process by which you achieve the end. Visualizing the end-result and how to get there is key to understanding a subject or skill, since it forces you to see the subject or skill as part of a process that can be repeated and performed.

3. PLAY AND REFLECT

Every repeatable process with predictable effects has rules or guidelines for producing those effects. Chess has rules, which allows you to get checkmate. Writing has rules, which allows you to communicate meaning clearly and impactfully. Physics has rules, which allows you to predict or calculate the values of certain physical states using mathematics.

Your job in understanding a subject or skill is to bring these rules or guidelines to life. This is called play. Simple enough.

The real problem occurs when people confuse playing with practicing. Practicing something, on its own, doesn’t build understanding (although it can help), but playing does. This is because true understanding is about being able to see the range of possibilities in a situation.

You understand chess, for example, not when you’re able to do certain moves, but when you’re able to react and strategize, making different moves each game, depending on the situation. And that ability to see what’s possible in something is the essence of playing.

When it comes to playing, start small. If you want to learn how to write well, for example, learn the rules of grammar and organization, and then bring those rules to life by writing short paragraphs. If you want to learn calculus, find out the basic rules of differentiation or integration, and use them on very easy problems. Come up with your own problems if you want to.

Play whenever you can and play until you feel stressed. When you start feeling stressed, as if you’re in uncertain territory, then stop and reflect. Reflect on what you did right and what you did wrong. Write your reflection down. Then continue playing (until stressed). Keep following this play-reflect pattern.

Every play should be coupled with a reflection. The reflection period (the Japanese call this hansei) is key to developing a deep, intellectual understanding of your skill-level, and it increases your ability to understand something very quickly.

4. GO BACK TO THE BASICS

The last strategy is regressing. For whatever subject or skill you’re trying to understanding, eventually you will start to advance. Your understanding will get more and more complex, you’ll become more focused on developing certain techniques or areas of knowledge.

When that happens, you need to go back to the basics. Go back to what you know for certain. Go back to those basic elements that you’d written down and re-write them over again. Go back to the end-result that you want and work backwards again. Go back to the basic rules of the skill or subject you want to understand and play them again, starting small.

It’s very simple. Go back and start over again. You constantly want to remind yourself of the bigger picture. This keeps you fresh and adaptive.

CONCLUSION

We’re seeing a new age, one in which success depends on your ability to learn and master many skills. With the Information Age, anyone today can become an artist, a scientist, or a writer. But with the Information Age, everything is becoming more and more complex. Life is becoming more stressful and distracting.

What is needed now, more than ever, are people who can increase their ability to think and understand, who can help us make sense of the growing complexity, and provide us with a pathway towards living a meaningful life.

Are you one of these people?