Nothing surprising here. Real results of studying like for many other activities is not about amount of time spent or effort put in. I met a lot of people who

Nothing surprising here. Real results of studying like for many other activities is not about amount of time spent or effort put in. I met a lot of people who would spend a lot of time learning things and then immediately forgetting it. Why? Because they were not interested in it. Being interested in stuff is what causes you to suck out the information about the topic from the environment. We even have whole structures in our brains like reticular activation system that evolved to help with it. Have you ever noticed that when you got interested in, say, bicycles, you suddenly start noticing what kind of bicycles people are riding, where are bicycle shops around you and that some people in your family have bicycles and some not? Even when this information was previously available to you but you just ignored it because you were not at all interested? You don't have to be actively searching for the information, the information just magically becomes available to you. Our brains are built to ignore everything that is not immediately interesting to you, you have to be interested in something to allow information to pass. When you are interested in something, you will develop complex, long lasting connections between parts of the material. If you are not interested you are at best just forcing yourself to store the material for retrieval. When you are interested in something, whenever you read new information it will cause retrieval of information you learned previously, it will cause you to think about both and will put the new information IN CONTEXT (connected with) the old information. It will also reinforce the older memory. It will also make the new memory much more discoverable, more likely to come up when you think about something else related. This is why students who put in a lot of work but are only interested in good grades can give you answers to the questions but will be unable to connect different things in a way that was not presented in the book. This is why topics like math (which is what I studied) are mercilessly punishing to people who think they can just memorise it. It is also why current way that math is being taught to kids is so misguided -- because it tries to turn the topic to something that can be memorised by only ever testing with tasks that were previously listed in a book so that the student can just memorise all types of tasks and the only thing they have to do is recognise which type of task they are faced with. This does not lead to any ability in math. As an interviewer I am very wary of hiring people who are not interested in what they are doing. Regardless of whether they are able to put in hours they are unlikely to ever improve in any significant way and are almost always only doing minimum to get by. Which in software development tends to result in a lot of technical debt because getting something to run is just about 20% of effort. Employees who are not interested are unlikely to form deeper connections about things they are doing. They stay forever amateurs in their field where mastery requires deep understanding. They will not react to complex problems other than in a shallow way.