For technical subjects (the "most important subjects" with respect to the future career I was planning), I never came out of lectures feeling like I understood the material. Only after reading the textbook, doing exercises, and re-reading the textbook (or looking up a concept online for an alternate explanation if the textbook's writing was ambiguous) did I feel any sort of confidence or perform well on exams.<p>Watching the lecture helped cement the material after already having a degree of knowledge, but they served best as optional, supplementary material. Since it served mainly to connect concepts together, I can see how watching it at 2x speed would serve the same purpose, but faster.<p>Most people in university would spend the bare minimum amount of time on both reading, exercises, and lecture in order to get a good grade, where good was defined as "the grade required in order to land a high-paying job". Since I was a non-conformist, I specifically made a point to read all the material assigned (and probably achieved ~80 - 90%), and one of my favorite activities when I was (rarely) ahead of schedule was to spend an hour reading a couple pages or a chapter of literature from an elective course. Every word, phrase, and sentence I would ponder about the meaning the author conveyed through multiple lenses (e.g. how did it affect the characters, the theme, the scenery, the world of the author, the culture he/she wrote them in, as well as the relation/history of the words used throughout the novel -- was this a motif? Did the phrase relate to any motifs?).<p>My professor mentioned "these books were meant to be enjoyed over many afternoons, to be read at leisure and to relate it to life with all its silly impossible circumstances and happenings". What was the end result of all this slow reading?
In one narrow sense, it led to me getting worse grades than perhaps I would have if I allocated all my time towards getting the best career possible. It also led to depression -- self-inflicted -- and existentialist contemplation as my outcomes were incredibly poor relatively speaking.<p>What were some of the positives? Sometimes I can look at the brick walkway beneath me and make some quirky, half-sensical remark like "ah, the herringbone
structure. The same one Brunelleschi used in the Duomo in Florence", to which any unfortunate souls try their best to follow socially as if that remark makes any sense in our conversation. Who knows, maybe Sartre would approve.