I imagine this varies a bit from person to person. My impression is that the best way to learn anything is with at least a significant amount of time spent deli

I imagine this varies a bit from person to person. My impression is that the best way to learn anything is with at least a significant amount of time spent deliberately practicing under expert supervision/tutoring. You want to be working at just the right difficulty, neither mindlessly repeating stuff that is too easy nor stuck on a project with too large a scope or too difficult prerequisites. Lots of “our time” (i.e. yours and mine) growing up in the 80s was surely wasted. I know I could have learned a whole lot more working 1:1 with an expert tutor/mentor instead of in an above average school class of 30 kids. I know some kids who had very high-touch mentorship and turned into real prodigies. (Of course, some others are pushed by controlling parents and feel resentful.) Even when it comes to extracurricular activities (like building stuff out of Legos, solving logic puzzles, cooking, playing sports, or whatever), I could have learned a whole lot more than I did if I wasn’t left mostly to my own devices, but had someone occasionally suggest challenging projects or show me some new ideas at my current level or fix up my misconceptions. And my parents surely spent far more time with me than average, especially in the first few years. I learned a great many things just fiddling around for hours and hours by myself, but most of that learning was grossly inefficient.