First was where my dad told me his role models would get most of their knowledge from biographies.<p>In college I did really well up to a point. Worked longer and harder and that made things worse. The best students slept early and were relaxed. So I capped my study hours, took care of diet and sleep, and developed a system for note taking. Long story short, it's reading the conclusion of the paper/chapter first, keeping a glossary, and breaking it down to the skeleton facts.<p>Then freelancing. Time/skills converted directly to money. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition worked best for this. There's an order to learning, e.g. you shouldn't start to learn a language with projects. Grinding skills gets you trapped as advanced beginner. There are multiple plateaus to mastery, and they usually require a mentor and some task.<p>Then after subscribing for MasterClass. It's not the classes themselves, but rather seeing what the top 0.1% had in common. Everyone had passion, a way of dealing with self-doubt, beginner's mind, and often some gaping flaw in their skill set which was transcended by some other skills.<p>Beginner's mind became a fascination - how does an expert see the same thing differently every day? Doesn't the expertise interfere?<p>The answer was in Thinking Fast and Slow's two systems. There's an intuitive system/muscle memory (1) and an active conscious mind (2). You can't let system 1 override system 2 - anger, fear, habit should not affect your perception. It's not a clear cut mental/physical separation either. Most of your learning will be done with system 1, including mental tasks like chess, debugging, algorithms. System 2's job is just to interrupt when it's on the wrong thing. This aligns perfectly with Dreyfus's model too.<p>I'd say the best way to learn is to totally trust your learning instinct. Don't think. Don't judge yourself. Just use your consciousness to observe. If you observe hard enough (beginner's mind), you'll be too focused to think, which puts you into flow.