I Never Made a Single Slide

I found a nice article by Karpicke & Blunt about how retrieval practice is underused. No, I’m not going to transcribe everything here. I’ll apply retrieval practice for this one — exactly what the paper encouraged. Put simply, recalling from memory with nothing in front of you beats elaborative studying like building concept maps with your notes open. Without us knowing, we’ve been doing this. Or at least, we can maximise what already works.

Retrieval practice vs elaborative studying: one recognising something when you see it and the other being able to reconstruct it cold. Verbatim questions test recall. Inference questions are different. They test whether you can connect dots nobody explicitly connected for you just like a kid asking “what happens if the sun doesn’t shine enough?” and you having to think through the ripple effects without getting the answer from Google. I mean yeah, Google explains some part, but you have to make the concept make sense to a kid. The study showed retrieval wins on both.

I realised later that this was basically how I learned on the job. First I stepped into corporate world, I expected to write code and wait for tasks like a chud. Of course I wasn’t getting off easily. I got chewed almost every day, drowning in business logic while churning code. What a hell. Journal vouchers, AP/AR, procurement flows, ERP modules — nobody handed me a textbook. I googled everywhere, observed processes on the fly until things slowly made sense. Then of course someone has to validate what I know. Hence, retrieval practice.

Four years in, I still make no Google Slides when it comes to school projects, nor for my Sfera clients. Every explanation has been me and the audience, direct. Diagrams drawn on the fly are just supplements, not the presentation itself. Though it’s always been a challenge to translate technical jargon into something even my anak buah can understand. Assume the audience is a blank canvas. The moment you introduce slides, attention becomes a triangle — the audience splits focus between you and the screen, and your power as the narrator gets halved. Remove the slides, and the triangle collapses into a direct line: you and the audience. Now you have to retrieve, and they have to actively listen. Shared understanding, not information transfer.

Here at the school, management is watching. Social pressure forces me to be coherent. “But okay… who am I pitching to when there’s no one around?” Yeah, I struggle with this too. I don’t have an audience all the time to explain my concepts to. Best I can do is drive-by knowledge dumps on this blog, reading out loud, sketching ugly on a notepad, and talking through a concept as if someone asked.

So, what about the notes? I call them disposable sketches. I never look back at my own writing — my handwriting is horrible because of this habit. The artifact is not the output. The act of producing it is the output. The real deliverable is the mental model that stays in your head after the paper’s in the bin. That’s what Karpicke proved in his studies.

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. Now go build something cool.