This is one of the best articles on the subject of rapid learning that I've seen in years. The point about knowing is being able to teach is particularly important. It's great if you have a patient friend or partner who is willing to listen to your half-baked explanations qua explorations of a new subject; just be willing to honestly answer that you don't know if your listener poses a question that had not occurred to you. Even alone, visualizing yourself teaching or applying an idea is a very powerful technique.
Don't be afraid of moving slowly through dense material, even if that leads to multiple reinventions of the wheel during study. There are few things more satisfying than contemplating an idea, observing a problem or question arising from it, and developing your own solution - followed by finding that same issue examined in a subsequent page or lecture. Sure, you could have just kept reading and had the answer handed to you on a plate, but that's much less memorable.
The practice exam is just as important, though. You're probably familiar with the saying 'an engineer is someone who can do for ten cents what any fool can do for a dollar.' Learning is an enjoyable experience for smart and curious people, but without putting pressure on oneself to reproduce the information learned the practice can be self-indulgent, and in that case the material is not remembered as well as it might be otherwise. If we think of learning as a sort of knowledge engineering, then we can also think of time as the cost constraint that sets the skilled professional apart from the amateur. Constraints force compromises, and learning how to make efficient compromises is extremely important. Perfectionism is a luxury that few of us can afford.
Don't be afraid of moving slowly through dense material, even if that leads to multiple reinventions of the wheel during study. There are few things more satisfying than contemplating an idea, observing a problem or question arising from it, and developing your own solution - followed by finding that same issue examined in a subsequent page or lecture. Sure, you could have just kept reading and had the answer handed to you on a plate, but that's much less memorable.
The practice exam is just as important, though. You're probably familiar with the saying 'an engineer is someone who can do for ten cents what any fool can do for a dollar.' Learning is an enjoyable experience for smart and curious people, but without putting pressure on oneself to reproduce the information learned the practice can be self-indulgent, and in that case the material is not remembered as well as it might be otherwise. If we think of learning as a sort of knowledge engineering, then we can also think of time as the cost constraint that sets the skilled professional apart from the amateur. Constraints force compromises, and learning how to make efficient compromises is extremely important. Perfectionism is a luxury that few of us can afford.