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... See more

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.

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

In this form, knowledge is not understanding. It’s merely an abstracted version of someone else’s lived experience; symbols on a page that attempt to summarize the nuances of each discovery.

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

No matter how much wisdom you gain from the pages of your favorite author, if you haven’t experienced the visceral events that led to that wisdom yourself, then it’s just knowledge. Sure, you can leverage the hard-earned wisdom of others to help you, but understanding only happens when you earn that wisdom in the tumultuous arena of real life.

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.

So any textbook you read has the forces of compression and incentives embedded into it. The removal of complexity and the generation of profit guide the distribution of knowledge, however subtly it may be.

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... See more