I’ve discussed before my friend Mike, and his quest to learn new things by mastering them, by taking the time to do them the painful, hard, and slow way so that he could get a nearly intuitive feel of what was involved.
Again, the goal here wasn’t to knock out as many tomahawks./bows/etc. of a good quality in as short a time as possible – in which case he would have had no problems with modern power tools like dremels, etc., but to learn the skills required at a deeper level.
That depth takes time.
We’ve seen the books. “Learn php in Seven Days!”
Let’s try the reality: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
In the article, Peter Norvig, researcher at Google, utterly skewers the attitude that you can “learn to program in ‘x’ in seven days.”
Again, it takes time. It takes practice. It takes repetition and challenging yourself to build new constructs and try new things so you don’t just understand the basic theory, but you have a near-intuitive grasp of how they fit together. You have a model in your head of what actually works, and what doesn’t.
The key is persistence.