*This* is something that I wish I had found affirmation for before (though I suppose I’ve been stubborn enough on that front not to have needed it). I’ve always sort of believed this, as one of my ‘personal heresies’ – things that you know are true that society doesn’t let you acknowledge. If you really want to understand something – to know fundamentally how it works, not just to stack someone else’s black box into the assembly of whatever you are working on, you pretty much *have* to reinvent the wheel. If you reinvent the wheel, it’s *your* wheel. In my case, I can reconstitute how something works and remember it far more effectively if I’ve done that at some point in the past, than if it were just some random magic-trick I couldn’t take the time to understand.
From Longuski, James, Advice to Rocket Scientists
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