I was never a good student in high-school. I was not a smart one either, at least not by any measure the school system was able to detect. And yet I ended up in the same rooms as the students who were.
How that happened, and what can actually be extracted from it, is what this essay is about.
A decade ago I finished high school with twelve years of catastrophic results behind me. Maths, physics, anything with a formula in it. And I had already decided I wanted a technical career: quant in finance, or data and applied science in tech. In France, where I did my engineering studies, those careers usually pass through the classes préparatoires, the brutal two year filter of maths and physics that feeds the top engineering schools. Nothing in my record suggested I was even average at STEM. So the problem was simple to state. Solve it, or drop the ambition.
And let me be honest about the first attempt, because that is where everything turned. In my final year of high school, the most decisive one in the French system, I worked. Genuinely worked. I put in the hours, I did the exercises, I stayed late.
It did not work.
That failure produced the idea I want to articulate here. It took me from bad at maths to excellent at maths in about a year, then kept paying for the decade that followed, in places that had nothing to do with school.
I had to repair the fundamentals before anything else could run, and I had to do it consciously, at eighteen. Breaking forces the mechanism into the open.
The mechanism is the difference between knowing something and understanding it.
Everyone nods at that sentence. It sounds basic. Of course you should not just know dates, formulas and facts, you should understand them. But do you, really? What does understanding even mean? At which point can you honestly claim you understand something? Is it even binary? I don’t see many asking this questions in their road for success, and even less internalized what it costs to actually live by the answer.
I will call it “lever le capot”.
It is a French expression, lifting the hood of a car, pop the hood in English. I like it because it names an act rather than a state. You can drive a car for fifteen years without ever lifting the hood. It will take you everywhere you need to go, right up to the morning it stops, and then you are standing on the side of a road next to a machine you have never once looked at. Knowing is driving. Understanding is opening the hood while the car still runs, when nothing is forcing you to.
It belongs to what I called primitives in a previous article. The small set of things that sit underneath hard work, discipline and intelligence, and without which none of them ignite.
It all started with one of the most influential figures in my life. Nietzsche.
In the middle of that failed year, at eighteen, I came across Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the idea of the Übermensch, the overman. I did not have the tools to read Nietzsche properly. What I grasped was enough.
Forget the caricature first. The Übermensch is not a superhero you become by doing everything right. And it is certainly not what German nationalists, and later the Nazis, made of it decades after his death, a distortion enabled largely by his own sister, who controlled his unpublished notes and bent them toward ideologies he explicitly despised. Nietzsche loathed antisemitism and German nationalism. He lost friendships over it.
The Übermensch, as I received it at eighteen, is a direction. Someone who takes nothing as given and rebuilds their own table of values from the ground up. That is the real blast radius of God is dead, which people read as an atheist victory lap when it first appears, in The Gay Science, as something much closer to panic. The old foundation under our values has collapsed and nobody has signed the new one. And it goes far beyond religion. Everything you once accepted as true is on the table. Fire burns, does it really, and why? Stealing is wrong, says who, and on what grounds?
Here is the terrifying part. If you can no longer outsource truth to scripture or to tradition, what can you trust? Nothing, at first. You will suffer on this path and you can genuinely get lost. The only way through is the process this whole essay is about. Lift the hood on everything. Ask why things are the way they are, with the honesty of a kid discovering the world, except this time the mind doing the asking answers only to you.
This is also why I find the religious hostility toward Nietzsche unfair. Nothing prevents an Übermensch from arriving at your exact morals and values in XYZ religion, you just have to be honest in the process. The difference is that they will hold them from the inside, examined and owned, not inherited and obeyed out of fear. Any cause should dream of followers like that. A militant who truly understands why they follow is the most dedicated kind there is. And the most dangerous.
There is a bigger contrast hiding in that last distinction. A value held out of fear, of an authority, of punishment, of hell, evaporates the second nobody is watching. A value held out of understanding survives behind closed doors. What that difference does to entire societies deserves its own article (tell me in the comments if we need to explore this next).
So I aimed this process at the thing that was breaking me. Maths.
I lifted the hood on my own studying and the diagnosis was immediate. Every hour I had put in was aimed at knowing. Thousands of exercises, memorized theorems, definitions, demonstrations I could replay like choreography. I could reproduce any scheme I had already seen. Hand me a new one and I collapsed, because there was nothing underneath.
Let me make it concrete, and I promise it stays simple.
In last year of high-school we study the exponential and the logarithm. On the knowing level I had everything. I could recite the properties,
and
, draw both curves from memory, apply the growth comparisons the syllabus demands. Enough to survive the first questions of any exam. Then the starred question arrived, the one that required seeing something, and I failed. Every single time.
Understanding began the day I stopped asking how to use the exponential and asked what it actually is. The answer fits in one line.
Its speed equals its size. The bigger it gets, the faster it grows. Sit with that for a second, because that single property is compound interest, virality, epidemics. The curve stopped being a drawing and became a character. Relentlessly positive, since
whatever you feed it. Accelerating without limit, a high speed train that gains speed with every kilometer already behind it.
The logarithm became the opposite character. Its speed is
, the inverse of where it stands. The further it travels, the lazier it gets. Generous at the start, then nearly flat, working forever for crumbs. And the two neutralize each other,
, mirror images across the diagonal.
Sounds childish? Watch what it buys. The exam drops a monster like
on you for an average high-school kid. Knowing panics, because it has never seen this exact scheme. Understanding reads behavior before computing anything. Positive everywhere. Peaks at zero. Dies fast on both sides. You have just sketched the famous bell curve without touching a derivative. Notice what just happened. Abstract formulas got wired to primitive concepts, speed, death, opposition, and you switched from running on memory to running on imagination. Dots connect on their own, and that is all intuition is.
My maths grades flipped within months, but that was nothing compared to what I gained that year for the rest of my life. The real unlock was noticing that the process transfers to absolutely everything.
This complex financial product is volatile. Why? Keep pulling and at some depth it stops being finance and becomes probability, incentives, human fear. Primitives. Why do the people of that country not rise against their tyrant? They are just submissive is a knowing answer. Keep pulling and you hit coordination problems, risk, the memory of repression, history. Concepts only an experienced political scientist can recite, but you got it with your free thinking.
It is everywhere. Every topic. Extrapolate, let your mind navigate. Here is the sociological example that took me the longest, because it lived in my own house.
Why do my parents, like most brown parents, care so much about what people will say?
The knowing answer is everywhere online. They are insecure. They live for the gaze of others. This mentality must be boycotted. Usually delivered from a superiority standpoint by someone who watched the West run on individualism and concluded that every other setting is a bug.
Lift the hood and the picture changes completely.
For most of history, in Morocco and everywhere else, reputation was not a comfort. It was infrastructure. Where the state was distant, courts unreliable and contracts unenforceable, your name was your credit score, your insurance and your police, all at once. If you were a commerçant in the medina, the community’s opinion of you was the difference between a functioning business and social death.
This is documented, not romanticized. The economist Avner Greif studied the Maghribi traders, merchants operating out of North Africa in the eleventh century, and showed they enforced honest deals across thousands of kilometers with no courts at all, largely through reputation. Cheat one partner and the entire network would refuse to ever deal with you again. Exclusion was the legal system.
And here is a detail I love. Bourdieu, the same sociologist from my last essay, started his career in Kabylia, describing a society where honor operated as the master currency of the entire social game. Long before he theorized capital, he was watching reputation function as one.
The same machinery also explains the worst, and I will not look away from it. In clan societies a stain on the family name devalued every member at once. Marriage alliances broke, credit dried up, protection thinned. That cold arithmetic, not some abstract taste for cruelty, is the engine behind honor violence, up to fathers killing their own children over shame. Understanding the mechanism excuses none of it. The “lever le capot” is not a tribunal. But you cannot dismantle machinery you refuse to look at.
And before anyone files this under my culture specifically, Nisbett and Cohen traced the culture of honor in the American South to herding economies where wealth could be stolen and the law was days away. Same conditions, same software, different continent.
So our parents inherited social software written for a world where exclusion could mean the end, and where a community happy with you meant your children eat. Globalization and the individualization of society changed the environment faster than the software could update. Today you can land alone in a city where nobody knows your name and build a full life. I am not saying the change is good or bad. It changed. Judging them with today’s eyes is knowing. Seeing the machinery behind their reflexes is understanding.
Now imagine running this process on everything you were ever handed. That is my call to action. Now how can we make this practical?
If I had to define understanding, it would be this. The cognitive process of connecting a new topic to primitives you have already interiorized, concepts so basic your mind can feel and imagine them. Knowing stores the new thing as an isolated file, it’s more of a memory function. Understanding wires it into everything already there. Which also answers the earlier question. No, it is not binary. Understanding has depth. Every additional primitive you connect deepens it, which is why you can always understand something better, and why the process never really ends.
And as in all my articles, I refuse to stop at the definition level. Here is what actually worked for me. Two practices.
The first is thinking out loud. During that transformative year I would walk around my room for hours, debating with myself in the simplest possible terms something that resists simplification, a brainstorming session with a single participant. I played both roles, the teacher and the stubborn student, and I promise you the student cursed at the teacher more than once. Always the same weapon. Why. Why is the definition of a limit in math built on a distance? What is this epsilon? A small value? How small? What do you mean, as small as anyone could ever demand? The harder I pushed, the more abstract the answers became, until I hit something primitive I could actually feel. A limit is a game. You challenge me with any precision, as tiny as you want, and I can always point to a place beyond which the function never escapes it. The day epsilon stopped being a Greek letter and became an opponent daring me, I stopped knowing the definition of a limit and started understanding it.
Years after adopting this habit I discovered that a much smarter man had, of course, thought of it before me. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize physicist and probably the greatest explainer science has ever produced, worked the same way. Take a concept, explain it in the simplest possible terms as if teaching a first year student, and treat every point where you get stuck or reach for jargon as a precise marker of what you have not understood yet. Once, asked to prepare a first year lecture on a notoriously deep physics question, Feynman came back empty handed, and his conclusion was not that the topic was too advanced for students. It was that physics itself did not really understand it yet. I am only here to confirm the method works, out loud or on paper. Paul Graham defends the written version in his essay that I highly recommend Putting Ideas into Words, and his point is exactly this one. Trying to put an idea into words is a test, and most half understood ideas fail it. Language of your choice, terms of your choice, throw the jargon away, you will pick it back up later.
The second practice is intellectual honesty. Never, under any pressure of people, time or ego, let yourself say I understand this before you actually do. And you now have the test. Did you connect it to primitives? Can you explain it in genuinely simple terms? No? Then you know it. You do not understand it yet. Treat the premature I understand as a lie, and as a lie told to the one person you can never afford to deceive.
I keep collecting confirmations of this since I started my career. I skipped a few steps of the normal tech progression and very early found myself preparing analyses and designing statistical experiments for senior executives running companies worth tens of billions. In those reviews, when the room goes silent, you understand why that person is paid ten to fifty times more than you. They have the courage to ask questions that sound so simple they feel almost dumb. Twenty pages into a dense analysis, the most senior person in the room asks something like, wait, why do we assume a customer who did not click was not interested? Silence. Nobody really has the answer, and that question turns out to be the key. As a junior you drown in which algorithm to pick and how to process the data. They take one step back and refuse to let twenty pages of details blind them from the primitives.
Which brings me to why this matters more right now than at any point in my life.
The internet already made knowledge abundant and cheap, but you still had to go learn it and carry it to sound smart. That constraint alone was weak enough to flood the public square with loud voices built entirely on knowing. AI removes even that. It knows everything and can make anything sound brilliant, so we now swim in polished content citing books, dates and scientific facts, produced by people, or systems, that never went through the process. Did they connect anything to anything? Did they lift a single hood? Distinguishing the two just became the hardest it has ever been. And the most valuable.
So here is the prediction this essay commits to. In the coming decades the real currency will not be execution, and it will not be knowing. It will be understanding, ahead even of agency, whatever the current gurus claim. You can delegate the thinking to AI. You cannot delegate the understanding. Why did it choose this design, this database, this approach? Can you explain it with primitives, in simple words, to a stubborn student? If not, you are not using a tool. You are hostage to one. Paul Graham again, in Writes and Write Nots, predicts a world split between people who write and people who let machines write for them, which in the end means people who think and people who do not. Same split, one level deeper, is coming for understanding.
So use AI the other way around. Make it your brainstorming partner, the stubborn student pacing your room, ask it to challenge you and to challenge itself. But never surrender the understanding, under any circumstances.
Those who understand can explain. Those who can explain can convince. Those who can convince can federate. And those who can federate can bend the destiny of our species at scale.
The hood is right there. Lift it. Lève le capot
Z
This article is entirely human-written. AI was used to fact-check details and proofread.
References
Nietzsche, F. (1882). *The Gay Science*.
Nietzsche, F. (1883). *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*.
Greif, A. (1993). Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition. *American Economic Review*, 83(3).
Bourdieu, P. (1966). The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society. In J. G. Peristiany (Ed.), *Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society*. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). *Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South*. Westview Press.
Goodstein, D. L., & Goodstein, J. R. (1996). *Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun*. W. W. Norton.
Graham, P. (2022). *Putting Ideas into Words*. Retrieved from <http://paulgraham.com/words.html>
Graham, P. (2024). *Writes and Write Nots*. Retrieved from paulgraham.com