Organic knowledge grows through a creator's lifelong experiences, interests, and trials. What sets it apart is its natural connectedness—it's both easy to understand and readily applicable across related fields.

The term comes from Paul Graham's essay Organic Startup Ideas, where he writes: "There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you." According to Graham, most successful startups in Y Combinator were built on organic ideas.

If you cannot explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

Richard Feynman’s series, Fun to Imagine is my favorite example of organic knowledge. He explains some physics concepts that I previously knew in a narrow, disconnected, partial, and technical manner, using the simplest terms. Feynman is the epitome of taking an organic approach to learning. As a physics student, he would go to freshman students to explain complex problems using only the simplest terms, rather than focusing on memorizing theories from textbooks. He believed that understanding complex issues in this way would lead to higher-quality conclusions.