All learning boils down primarily to one thing — building mental models.
During my electrical engineering undergraduate program, we were (involuntarily) subjected to a lot of dense math.
At the beginning of the semester, had I seen all those complicated equations, I would have gone nuts. But as you went through the course, bit by bit, you started assigning meaning to each term in the equations.
As an example, a terrifying-looking integral would be reduced to “This is the energy in the signal.” So you went from math to its underlying meaning.
In fact, when you really understood the equation, you would likely be able to write down its plain English ‘translation.’ At that point, your mental model was complete.
The world is unbelievably complex — be it the technology in your computer, or how thousands of people created that computer out of sand, steel, and plastic, and had it delivered to your doorstep.
Where are the geniuses who figured this out? There are no geniuses.
It is just a bunch of smart, hard-working people who had mental models for various parts of the problem.
When you are learning anything, be it computer science or even medieval history, ask yourself: What themes can I abstract out? What patterns do I notice here?
Once you have abstracted out the patterns into some mental models, there is nothing in the world you can’t understand — not even medieval history.
– Rajan