I don't do well with formal education and what this article describes as "preliminary learning", I'm 100% "on-demand". I've always learned through experience an

I don't do well with formal education and what this article describes as "preliminary learning", I'm 100% "on-demand". I've always learned through experience and practice of things. A lot of that is driven by a feeling of "what is this thing." It's kind of adjacent to "how does this thing work" but more abstract, as in fitting it into a system of existing ideas and concepts and building endless categories and subcategories. I've found that this makes instant proficiency with a lot of things easy ("oh, it's one of these") and mastery fairly quick too ("it's one of these, but with these key differences/details"). The biggest downside is I learn (truly) new things slowly. Where most people note things down, remember them and move on, I can't learn until I've understood what the new thing is, in the sense of having some sort of complete idea of what it is (not necessarily with all the details, just enough for it to be coherent). But once that is absorbed I can move on fairly quickly. So when I'm being taught "preliminary" I just can't get whole picture I need, and it all goes by too quickly for me to figure it out in classes and lectures. The other problem with this sort of teaching is that it tends to be bottom up whereas my mind tends to work top-down, not wanting to know most details until later. I'm more interested in why you would want to have this thing as it is or why you need it at all, because that reveals much more to me, rather than describing how it works or how it fits in with the next step up.