One of my favorite ways to learn something new is to teach a class about it. It’s a little counterintuitive—how can you teach something before you’ve fully learned it? But I’ve found that the act of teaching and sharing back what I’ve learned is one of the most effective ways to solidify knowledge.
Why? Because teaching forces you to engage with the material in ways that passive learning just doesn’t.
Here’s why it works so well:
Why Teaching Back Helps Reinforce Your Own Learning
Teaching Requires Mastery (or At Least Competence)
To explain something to someone else, you need to understand it deeply enough to break it down. This forces you to grapple with the material in a way that just reading or listening to a lecture doesn’t. If you can’t explain it clearly, you probably don’t understand it well enough—yet.It Forces You to Simplify and Synthesize
The process of teaching requires distilling information into simpler frameworks, breaking down big concepts into actionable steps, and finding metaphors or examples that make the ideas click. In doing this, you often discover the core essence of what you’re learning.The Best Time to Teach Is Right After You Learn
When you’ve just learned something, you still remember what it feels like not to know—the confusion, the stumbling blocks, the 'aha!' moments. That empathy makes you a better teacher because you naturally anticipate the questions that might trip others up.It’s a Built-In Forcing Function
When there’s a date on my calendar that says, "You need to show up and teach people something on Friday," I have no choice but to get my act together. It creates external accountability, making sure I meet the deadline—especially useful as a solo operator and founder, where self-imposed deadlines can otherwise slip.
Making Teaching a Habit
I’ve found that keeping my schedule packed with moments where I need to show up and teach helps me stay engaged and motivated. It’s easy to get lost in solo work, but when you have regular opportunities to share what you’re learning, it keeps the momentum going.
The best part, of course, is that teaching also doesn't just help the students—it helps the teacher just as much, if not more. It turns knowledge into something active and generative rather than something passive. Since I spend so much time gathering insights from the edges of the tech ecosystem, teaching gives me a way to process and distill those ideas. More importantly, it allows me to share them with people who aren’t as far along the tech adoption curve and hear their honest take on what’s happening.
For anyone building anything on the Internet, that real-time feedback loop is immensely helpful for staying grounded with the reality of what end users need.
A Future Where Everyone Teaches and Learns
In my ideal world, everyone is both a learner and a teacher, all the time.
Education doesn’t have to be confined to a physical classroom. As we're noticing, traditional academic structures often can’t keep pace with the needs of student learners trying to make sense of the rapidly changing word around us, let alone adult learners who are trying to upskill. The reality is, we all need to hone our skill of learning something everywhere, just to keep up. Part of this means accessing teaching moments among near-peers, or in more deliberately sharing back yourself.
Notably, teaching doesn't have to be in a classroom environment, nor does the teaching need to take place in super formalized "courses." We see this every day in the rise of influencer-driven learning—where niche experts share knowledge organically. TikTok creators break down their expertise into bite-sized insights on fashion, cooking, travel, or parenting. YouTube is an endless repository of how-to guides on everything from how to code to how to fix your broken toilet. The way we learn is shifting, becoming more decentralized, more communal, and more accessible than ever.
When individuals can move faster than institutions, there's a moment when certain new-new information lives within people not organizations. The only way to unlock that knowledge is to share it. And the best way to solidify your own learning is to give yourself a platform to teach.
I’m learning something new every day. But rather than keeping that knowledge in a silo, I’m making it a habit to share—whether by teaching, writing, or simply passing it along in conversation, often as soon as I learn it. The act of teaching reinforces what I know, and it keeps knowledge moving.
So, what’s something new you’ve learned lately? And who could you teach it to?
Subscribe to Hard Mode First to receive new posts directly to your inbox.
Teach to Learn: Why Sharing What You Know Makes You Smarter Considering the powerful possibility that each of us is a learning, and a teacher, all the time https://hardmodefirst.xyz/teach-to-learn-why-sharing-what-you-know-makes-you-smarter
Discover how teaching can reinforce learning in @bethanymarz's latest blog post. Exploring why explaining concepts enhances comprehension, providing external accountability, and encouraging a feedback loop, it reveals the dynamic capabilities teaching offers. Teach and learn, all at once!