The more you teach, the more you learn..

Published by Jeet Tan on July 2, 2024July 2, 2024

Here are some stats on learning retention.

Reading something – 10% retention

Listening and reading something – 20% retention

Seeing a demonstration – 30% retention

Engaging in a discussion of the topic – 50% retention

Practicing something you learnt – 75% retention

Teaching someone what you learnt – 90% retention

As you can see just by reading about something once, you’ll retain only 10% of what you’ve read.

Whereas the best way to learn something is either practicing (active learning) and finally teaching what you’ve just learnt to someone else.

Teaching someone a skill, will not only help enhance someone else’s skill in something. But you’re able to retain up to 90% of the knowledge you’ve learn.

Why does this phenomenon happen?

This is called the protégé effect, where a learner learns the most being a teacher because it compels the teacher to retrieve information of what they’ve previously studied.

As I’ve talked about in my blog, the product and marketing are interrelated. There’s no such thing as a marketing department separate from the product. This means that when you’re educating prospects about your product, you’re actually learning the most about your business.

Through marketing, this is a relationship where everyone benefits, you learn more about your product and your prospects take something new from it.

Self-knowledge is always the best knowledge. When you’re teaching things to other people, you’re taking the most out of the learning.

This is why I always urge people to create as much content as possible, by nature your content is going to influence your audience, but you’re also the one that’s going to be learning through the process.

It’s a win/win scenario where you’ll attract many clients while at the same time, you’re learning.

This principle can be applied to just about anything. Teach more to learn more. You don’t have to be fully qualified to teach something, in fact when you teach something you’re going to get better at the skill you’re teaching.