Familiarity. Do something mindless over and over. Then do something slightly less mindless until it also becomes mindless muscle memory. It’s not about memoriz

Familiarity. Do something mindless over and over. Then do something slightly less mindless until it also becomes mindless muscle memory. It’s not about memorization. It’s about repetition. Even things that cannot be memorized, like randomly generated puzzles, are solved by this. Through practice and life experience you learn what mindless things to practice and which to avoid. Things that do not directly accomplish a goal but require intense learning are things best avoided. For example I have spent my career as a JavaScript developer avoiding the large stupid frameworks. This has harmed my career mobility but has allowed me to focus on skills most JavaScript developers cannot do: accessibility, performance, security, A/B testing, test automation, and really just about absolutely everything possible aside from some giant stupid framework API. There are pros/cons to not spending time with stupid. You are far less likely to be hired to do stupid beginner things, like put text on screen and pretend you are engineering, but once you get past that you are suddenly qualified for things that pay much more. This pattern applies to everything even unrelated lines of work.