Years ago in college, for the toughest course I'd carefully pick an advanced textbook - something one or two levels ahead of the current one - and soak myself i

Years ago in college, for the toughest course I'd carefully pick an advanced textbook - something one or two levels ahead of the current one - and soak myself in that. Example: for an introductory quantum mechanics course I read Dirac's book, then supplemented this with Russian problem books - they were the best & came with answer gists. I would freely look up answers for the tough problems, then go back and see if I could come up with a better way. After this regimen, the course itself became a minor formality. I realized only much later that this was an obsessive approach, like buying chess books after losing early in one's first tournament. There was no sense of carpe diem, it was about owlishly building up a 10:1 advantage before closing in.