To provide a different perspective, I got exponentially better at my job when I decided to embrace deliberate memorization. I sort of have these mental patterns

To provide a different perspective, I got exponentially better at my job when I decided to embrace deliberate memorization. I sort of have these mental patterns of "irreducible complexity" built up--things I couldn't or wouldn't have gotten organically, because I memorized half-understood or not-immediately-useful-but-promising-looking things until I could lock them together, like holding up a two legged table until I could find a third leg. I came to think of them like mental scaffolding. The scaffolding ended up discarded in the end, but I wouldn't have the building without it.