I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "ge

I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "get it" if you are memorizing. If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do that new thing. As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to "learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing that context. If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts out of it: this is the act of inventing.