I ran to my mom, utterly disappointed in myself, asking, “Why did you birth such a dumb kid?” after I failed my JEE (an Indian Engineering Entrance Exam). Cause I believed learning was capped by whatever talent you were born with. Years later I realized how freaking wrong I was. I’ll tell you why.
Learning involves acquiring knowledge and understanding and ability to apply it for a new concept. Here learning could be a science topic or a chord progression or a boxing move.
Learning is just like any other skill. The soul of learning is figuring out “What you need to know?” in order to unlock the rest. Any concept is sum of few foundational concepts. Understanding apparently complex topics require you to understand those building blocks and relations amongst them. Being stuck at a concept is mostly either lack of understanding of the constituent particles or it itself being a foundational concept. Rather than lack of talent.
For the first case identifying “What subtopic am I tripping at?” that enables me to understand this topic is the key. To put this into a simple analogy - Think of any concept you are probably afraid of as a building made of bricks. To build a huge building you need bricks which are the sub-topics.
Whereas for the second case - When you are starting from scratch or when the concept itself is a fundamental primitive - You just have to hold those ideas abstractly in the mental space until more concepts are built on top of this. What does this look like - This is genuine lack of understanding. At this point you have knowledge of the primitive idea. Not understanding. It could look like a leaf unattached to the tree floating in air.
They are actually dependent on each other, the understanding of the axioms enables you to understand the meta concepts and the meta concepts in turn change your understanding of the axioms.
This is a loop. It’s possible every time you revisit the concept your understanding changes as you acquire new knowledge. Keep on repeating until it converges.
So, to learn a new concept - Do NOT Fear - The barrier to knowledge is close to zero in this era, Understanding can be enabled by divide and conquer. And ability to implement a concept is simply understanding of the concept + repeated training.
One important caveat here, this works in domains where there is a clear objective to reach. Like a learning particular topic “Quantum Entanglement” or “Coding a specific logic” or “Playing a song”, or “Solving a math problem” etc.. i.e. the domains where you have a specific structure and strong feedback signal.
If you want to explore the emotional side of this idea, read Why Learning Feels So Hard?.