When you train your mind to see the real world around you as lists of things that you can organize (and lists of lists, etc.—it's lists all the way down), more

When you train your mind to see the real world around you as lists of things that you can organize (and lists of lists, etc.—it's lists all the way down), more and more of your programming tasks become intuitive. It even leads to understanding functional programming, mutability, referential passing, OOP. You discover that many terrible programming analogies actually aren't terrible at all because you intuit their application better than with the analogy alone. Why? Because CS is filled with practicable patterns that have real-world counterparts, and your brain synthesizes the complexities of the real world in myriad ways that just programming never could.