George Bernard Shaw was a 47-year-old curmudgeon when he wrote in the play Man and Superman:
Those who can do, those who can’t teach.
For the rest of us, midlife is the perfect time to learn and develop new expertise. Turns out, the way to develop expertise is to teach someone else what you learn.
Acquiring new skills is an evidenced-backed way of keeping your brain sharp and memory keen. Sharing new knowledge gives you an extra brain boost from synthesizing what you’ve learned and then paying it forward.
Explain, please
Teaching has long been seen as an effective tool to sharpen your intelligence, going all the way back to the ages of Seneca and Socrates. The magic lies in the interactive exchange of information, or as author Michael Simmons calls it, the Explanation Effect:
Looking at text and expecting to learn is not far off from looking at food and expecting to get its nutrients. We need to digest our life experiences just like we digest our food. Without some form of active processing, almost everything we read is lost within weeks.
This doesn’t mean that you have to scramble to find a gig as an adjunct professor. Teaching things to others is something you can do in the context of daily life.
Teach something new every day
Research shows what makes learning-by-teaching effective lies not in passively reading or redoing notes, but in the active retrieval process. You’ve got to know what you’re talking about to explain and retain it.
Simmons has a few easy suggestions about how to incorporate teachable moments into daily life:
- Talk to a friend about a book you’ve just finished
- Show your coworker a new production technique
- Explain a life lesson to your children
- Join a mastermind group
- Think through a challenging concept out loud
Or you could just keep a Today I Learned log by recording it in a journal for yourself, or sharing a new concept with others in person or on social media. You can start now by teaching someone what you just learned from reading this article. 🙂
Memory & Learning Breakthrough: It Turns Out That The Ancients Were Right (Medium)
