“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
-Albert Einstein
What does it mean?
Einstein had strong beliefs about how people should share information. While he developed some incredibly complex ideas – like relativity – he had many others that he wrote and spoke about. He believed that everything should be kept “as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Here, he’s arguing that if you can’t explain something simply, that it probably means you don’t really understand it all that well. You might be able to do something really well, but you probably don’t understand the foundations like the “how” and “why” as deeply as you need to explain it to someone else.
What should I take from this quote?
You may be really good at something – even the best – because you’ve practiced it. But if you can’t explain it clearly and simply to another person, then that suggests that you don’t really understand how it works.
That may be fine – or it might be big trouble. Let’s suppose you do a very specialized job at work, and you realize that you can’t explain to friends or family how you do your job. That means you don’t understand how it really works at the roots. So what happens if a machine took over your job? You don’t understand it very well, so you can’t take what you know and get another similar job. That’s bad! That means that you’re relying on your job always existing, exactly the way it already is – which is very risky in today’s technological world.
Similarly, being able to explain things to others simply and clearly is a very important skill. It’s your way of knowing you understand things, sure. But it’s also critical because sharing ideas and teaching others is a skill that all people should master. You benefit the most from the ways in which you build up those around you, and sharing ideas and teaching others are some awesome ways to do that.
So, make sure you try this exercise: take something simple and try to teach someone else how to do it. Many people can’t teach a kid how to tie their shoes! Why? Because they’ve done it for so long, it’s automatic, and they don’t really know how to explain the steps. You’ll be surprised how much you can improve your skills by working on this!
What’s not-so-great about this quote?
While I really like this quote, there is one negative. I think it implies that teaching others is a skill that all people should have in them. All a person needs to do to be a good teacher, therefore, is to understand the thing.
But that’s not exactly true. Good teachers have incredibly refined skills that make them great.
That said, I think this quote is less about being an incredible teacher, and more about being able to explain things simply and clearly to others.