I learn similarly (breadth first search + going deeper when needed) and my wife just does depth first seach. I've tried studying with her when we were at univer

I learn similarly (breadth first search + going deeper when needed) and my wife just does depth first seach. I've tried studying with her when we were at university and we just couldn't make it work - she would want to go 10 levels deep into the first subject and I would get insane trying to remember all the nested questions that get us there withotu understanding where the thing I'm learning about will be used :) Her problem is she gets discouraged halfway through and never gets to use the stuff she learned. My problem is I got good at winging it and looking up stuff as needed so I never learn the stuff I didn't needed even when it could be useful if I knew about it. Probably some compromise would be the best - start with what you need and force yourself to go deep into one random topic each month. > I remember dealing with folks that would spend three days, writing CLI tools that saved, maybe two hours, over the course of a year. My friend is like that, but I learnt to aprecciate this when I worked with him. The script maybe only saved 1 minute of work 10 times a year, but more importantly it's self-checking documentation of how we are doing stuff we rarely do.