The pursuit of knowledge is heralded as a virtue, but the attainment of understanding is far more important.

Because in the end, it’s only through self-exploration where lasting wisdom can be found. No book – regardless of its profundity – can act as an adequate substitute for that.

When you’re given a textbook, you’re effectively given a history of discoveries. What you have in there is a distillation of theories and findings that other humans have happened upon.

In other words, you have a long recounting of experiences that are not your own. And in order for these experiences to make sense for the everyday student, they need to be compressed into a digestible format. A great textbook plays the game of simplification, not complexity. The more these experiences can be communicated as stories, the greater the... See more

I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that said, therein lies the value of writing. Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time. When you write, it becom... See more

The first question to address is: How do we attain knowledge?

What this means is that the way we absorb knowledge is dependent upon what others have deemed valuable. The scholars that put together these textbooks decide what pieces of information to include, and market forces determine which textbooks make it to each school. What the student is left with is the result of this piecemealing and marketing that h... See more

So this begs the question: What, then, is understanding?

To explain what I mean here, we have to first delve into the difference between knowledge and understanding. On its surface, it may seem like a game of semantics, but if you explore this further, you’ll see that the nuances make all the difference.