From LEARNING (1.), it’s easy to see the heavy emotional aspect of learning — it’s easy to remember emotional events, hard to remember when stressed and it’s impossible to be purely mechanical with our thinking. It’s nothing close to rational as people like to say.
Stress can make you forget things not only when learning but also the things you’ve already learnt. Overlearning to the point of automaticity can combat it partially (well, I’ve tripped while walking one too many times to say it’s perfect).
Being attentive and deliberate (zoom-out-zoom-in) can also help in unlearning and correcting mistakes which you might have learnt a long time ago.
Learning should be emotional but not painful. If it’s painful, you need to look at other aspects of your life — where do these uncomfortable feelings come from?
Intuition — where you don’t know how you came to a conclusion — is the result of a lot of learning and creative thinking. Again, it’s a feeling, a hunch as to what might be an important idea or what the solution might be. The more you learn and connect ideas, the easier it gets.
Familiarity makes hard work seem easy. Seeing someone do it, imagining doing it counts as a partial rep done right. The reason apprenticeship works well is we learn a lot not only by reading and doing but seeing someone else do it, learning the nuance of the work. If all things fail while learning something, watch a step by step tutorial and copy. YES, copying ain’t bad. And it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy when compared to doing the entire thing completely on your own.
Completion vs Perfection — Do you do Level 1 well before moving on to the next or do everything and come back to improve each level? I don’t know if there’s a “correct” way but I think it’s an personal emotional choice. Some like being really good at something before moving on to the next, some like doing a lot of things. I see myself jumping between the extremes based on my interests (yeah, never like the schooling system).
Critical mass and isolation — when you’re learning as a beginner, it’s easy to get dejected as most of the common ideas are still elusive. Till that day comes, it’s important to have a safe space to learn and show your ideas in. And Play! to keep yourself engaged.