Learning that learning takes more than an hour, no matter the domain. You said it yourself: "A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon kno

Learning that learning takes more than an hour, no matter the domain. You said it yourself: "A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge". Understanding a skill takes time, energy, and discipline to improve is all you can do. Everything else is simply spending an hour "doing something". If you keep the "something" to a smaller set of "things", then maybe you can learn something over several one hour sessions.