Rubber Duck Self-Improvement

~410 Words | ~2min Read

Have you ever solved a bug by talking to your rubber duck? You know the drill, right? Explain your problem to an inanimate object, and suddenly the solution appears! But a colleague recently connected a dot for me. I was talking about the current shape of my journalling practice. I had started iterating through work challenges in days rather than weeks! And I had connected this to an educational technique: Narration.

Over the break, I had read about classical education. Narration is a simple, but powerful pedagogical method. The students explain what they’ve learned in their own words. In doing so, they’re actively accessing that memory. They are re-embedding it, and connecting it to their existing knowledge. They’re also talk about the lesson in a way that other students can understand. Perhaps even better than the way the teacher was lecturing.

The act of narrating what I was doing, even to an “audience of one,” was accelerating my learning in ways I hadn’t expected. With this practice of regular narration, I was iterating faster. I would recognize the need, start thinking about solutions. It might appear in several journals as I mulled it over. Having talked to myself about it several times, I’d get annoyed at having the problem! So I would solve the problem at the next opportunity rather than waiting until the next sprint. The difference wasn’t just speed. It was the quality of insight.

There’s old proverb: “when one teaches, two learn.” But you don’t need a student. When one explains, even to himself, one can learn. The act of narrating your work, of explaining what you’re doing and why, forces the same synthesis that makes narration so powerful. You don’t have to have it all figured out yet. Just record your current thoughts. Build on them next time. Grow over time.

Rubber duck debugging has been around for decades. And it relies on the same mechanisms that old school pedagogy used to foster education. The difference now? You can capture these narrations throughout your day, creating a record of your thinking that compounds over time. It’s not just debugging anymore. It’s rubber duck self-improvement.

Try narrating your work today, maybe to a voice recorder. Talk through what you’re building, what’s challenging you, what you’re learning. You might be surprised how quickly the insights start flowing.