One of the best ways to master a subject is by teaching others about it.
Explaining something to someone who has never heard about it requires clarity in your thoughts and ensures that you know what you’re talking about. It’s also a great way for you to verify your level of knowledge. Simply said, if the person you’re talking with can easily understand what you’re talking about, that means you’ve been able to deconstruct your message in a way that was easy to understand and transmit to other people, and you can’t do that without first knowing the subject yourself. I like to think that it doesn’t matter how complex a subject is, you can always deconstruct it in a way that it’s possible to teach it to others.
The benefits of learning by teaching don’t stop there. The more you talk about a subject, the more you are perceived as an expert by other people.
It’s important to note that it’s not necessary to lie about your expertise level in order to reach an audience. Being honest and talking only about what you really know is more appreciated than pretending to know everything.
Documenting your journey
When I say learning by teaching, I’m not referring to things like organizing workshops around a subject when you have no experience in the first place. That would be a scam, and you would be perceived as a charlatan.
So what do people like, and want? I can tell you from experience that most people like honesty and truth. It’s easy to just talk about something without having any kind of experience, but real people want to see the dirty work being done so that they can learn from it and do it themselves, or just use it as inspiration.
How to reach an audience
There are many ways that you can use to reach an audience, but the simplest way is by creating a blog. It’s extremely easy to setup a blog these days, and you can do it for free in less than 10 minutes (you can email me if you need help). Once you have a blog, you can start by writing on it and documenting your journey.
The best part is that by doing this your learning experience is not limited to the subject you’re trying to learn, indeed even your writing and communication abilities will improve, as well as your technical skills.
Becoming an expert
When you’re first starting out, it’ll be hard to write about stuff that you don’t know very well. For example I recently started a blog about mac programming, and it takes me several days to write each post. Not only that, but I have to get my hands dirty and experiment with stuff that I’ve never used before. I do know one thing though, that it doesn’t matter how much it takes to publish each post, each time I do that I’ll know something new that I didn’t knew before, and I’ll have access to more advanced topics that I couldn’t have previously understood.
Of course the more time you dedicate to learning a subject the sooner you’ll be mastering it, but as long as you’re constant with it, you’re be doing fine.
Being recognized as an expert
The advantage of learning by teaching is that by the time you’ll be an expert about a subject, everyone will know it, and will recognize you as such. For example if you keep writing about public speaking for two years and you constantly interact with people interested in public speaking, then you’ll be recognized as an expert about public speaking. Not only that, but you’ll also have a record to show to people who want to know more about your previous experience.
Returning to my previous example, if I keep writing on my mac programming blog, one year from now I’ll have something concrete to show to potential employers if I’ll be looking for a job. Of course I could do this by working on existing projects for free, but since my knowledge is still limited I prefer to write my own stuff so I can experiment with what I want.
Conclusion
Learning by teaching is not just what I’ve written here. There are many other side effects that are hard to predict and that depend on what you’re trying to learn. In most cases though, by talking publicly about your journey you’ll be exposed to opportunities that otherwise would not have been available to you.