When I went to university, I studied a subject that was so complex that I could never wrap my head around it, but, for some reason, others could. I tried to understand the thing but I couldn't. Not only that, but there was barely time to think critically about anything on that heap of ideas because there were a lot of them and if you stopped and tried to think, you would immediately receive a bad score. That made me increasingly suspicious about what I was trying to learn.

How was it possible that I would be rewarded by just being a memorizing machine and not by analyzing or having a solid foundation in my way of thinking?