What You Dismiss Might Be What You Don't Understand Yet

For eight years of schooling, I had a science teacher who regularly offered the same explanation for my struggles: “Girls are just not good at this.”

Lacking a sense of agency and a mental latticework on which critical thinking could be built upon, I accepted his claim as a given fact, and zoomed out. By the time I tried to pay attention again in 10th grade, I was lost.

Because learning depends on prior knowledge, I lacked the fundamental understanding required to grasp anything the new lessons were built on. I finished high school without having any clue about chemistry or physics.

A similar illusion of disinterest followed me into adulthood.

I labeled myself “unpolitical” until I was 25. The absence of any fruitful engagement with politics and history throughout my business studies in Frankfurt and Vienna reinforced my belief that I was just not interested in that.

I bought into the illusion that politics didn’t concern me. I told myself that nothing in my personal life was political, and even if it was, I couldn't change anything anyway. So, why even bother trying to understand it?

It took me until I was 28 to wrap my head around World War I and II, and the implications of the Holocaust—thanks entirely to coincidental enjoyment of historical fiction and stumbling upon Viktor Frankl and Edith Eger by what must have been a self-help must-read book list by some manager on my LinkedIn feed.

From there, I found my way to Octavia Butler, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, and my convenient little illusion completely shattered. I realized that everything is political, and that “not being interested” is, rather than a smart neutral choice, a very active choice to maintain the status quo, even when that status quo isn’t serving most people.

I could tell you similar stories of how I ignored arts, culture, literature, and poetry, but I will spare you.

Why am I telling you this?

To surface an interesting truth about lifelong learning: We often dismiss things as “uninteresting” when, in reality, we simply lack the foundational knowledge to be curious about them.

Author Maria Popova finds ever so beautiful words to this:

“I am a latecomer to poetry. For many years I dismissed it the way we dismiss things in which we’re not literate. I have no education in poetry. And then I met this wonderful person—Emily Levine, comedian, philosopher of science, great lover of poetry, […] she was in her 70s, I was in my 20s.”

Popova had met Levine—a comedian and philosopher of science—on a transatlantic flight, and much to the annoyance of the cabin, they talked the entire way. Levine had a brilliantly associative mind, leaping effortlessly from Hannah Arendt to stoicism.

Levine loved poetry. Popova, on the other hand, did not.

One Sunday afternoon in a packed cafe in Chelsea, Popova rolled her eyes at the mention of poetry one too many times. Levine gripped the edge of the table, rose to her full height of four-foot-four, and began theatrically reciting T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

When she delivered the line, “Do I dare to disturb the universe?” she sat back down. The New York cafe stopped, put down their drinks, and started applauding.

“Of course,” Popova recalled, “my universe was disturbed.”

From that day on, Levine took it upon herself to build a bridge for Popova. She sent her one poem a day, accompanied by just a few lines explaining why she loved it. Even when Levine fell terminally ill, they continued taking weekend “poetry retreats” in Northern California cabins, just reading poems and talking about the universe.

Because of Levine’s thoughtful scaffolding, Popova learned to attach poetry to a mental model she already deeply understood and loved: science.

Popova went from proudly “not caring” about poetry to hosting a massively popular show called The Universe in Verse, gathering thousands of people to listen to Patty Smith read poetry about dark matter.

It begs the question: How do you know whether you’re actually not interested in something, or whether you’re just illiterate in it?

This illusion of disinterest is why so many people think they “aren’t a math person.”

In a geography class, you can understand how a volcano erupts without needing a deep, factual understanding of tectonic plates. But math doesn’t work that way. It requires previous rules and foundational understanding to build upon.

If you don’t really grasp that 304 means 3 hundreds, 0 tens, and 4 ones, then decimals like 3.04 or percentages like 30.4% will feel totally arbitrary.

If you don’t understand a basic slope (how much y changes when x changes), you’ll struggle with derivatives. A derivative takes the idea of a slope one step further to ask: how steep is this curve at this exact point? Without the earlier concept of a slope, a derivative feels like a mysterious, random procedure. With it, the derivative becomes a natural extension—not a random rule, but “slope, upgraded.”

The same goes for functions. If f(x) feels like abstract code rather than a simple relationship between an input and an output, then f’(x) will feel like symbol soup. A derivative describes how a function changes.

So, how do you fix a missing foundation? You have to immerse yourself and build an initial understanding by attaching new concepts to existing mental models.

The easiest way to do this is through analogies.

By bridging what you don’t know to what you already know, analogies act as “handles” to grasp slippery concepts. They let your brain use its natural association system instead of forcing it to memorize raw facts, making new material feel concrete, meaningful, and easier to remember. That is why analogies create those sudden “lightbulb moments.”

A great analogy…

• is a cognitive bridge. It should connect the unfamiliar idea to something you already understand deeply, without needing a second explanation.

• is selected for structural fit. The best analogy mirrors the logic of the concept. Water and pipes may not be exciting, but they map reasonably well onto some features of electricity.

• reduces cognitive load. It should make the target idea easier to think about, not add extra information, lore, or emotional noise.

• is “less wrong,” not perfect. All analogies distort reality. The question is whether the distortion is useful at your current stage of learning.

• should eventually disappear. It is a scaffold. Once you grasp the concept, you should move beyond the analogy and understand the thing itself.

Popova was very lucky. She had Emily Levine to gently scaffold a difficult subject for her.

Most of us don’t have a brilliant, four-foot-four philosopher waiting in a cafe to disturb our universe. We don’t have someone who knows our minds well enough to build the perfect cognitive bridge for us. We hit a wall, we assume we just aren’t wired for the subject, and we quit.

But if you don’t have an Emily Levine, you can build the bridge yourself.

Coming up with structural, perfectly-fitted analogies from scratch is difficult, but AI is uniquely brilliant at it—if you constrain it. If you just ask ChatGPT for an analogy, you usually get generic, surface-level comparisons.

Here is the prompt I use to be my own Emily Levine. I keep this saved in my notes so I can use it whenever I hit a plateau with a new, intimidating concept.