>>13194895start paying attention to the moments when you were stuck, and then had a breakthrough. ask yourself what was blocking you from seeing something immediately, and what made you finally click. write this down somewhere to not forget, review it, and turn it into a system.
i don't think there's a general method, proficiency is domain specific, but there are a few safe assumptions:
- brain is just a wet sponge, you have to feed it with tons of examples before it starts seeing patterns
- you can speed up the process by simplifying, fixing variables to constants, so you have less moving parts and focus on the essential
- getting stuck feels bad, but it means you exhausted all your known options, and there's a learning opportunity. train yourself to get excited when you smell something new is coming
- people who got good have built a mental model of a problem, they don't move around blindly, but constantly validate things against the model. for example in rts games noobs memorize build orders, someone proficient knows what units he's going to produce, what ratios of resource production is needed, so he can pull it all out of his head
it's all nice and clear to this point, but there's something missing in the above. for example in chess, you can calculate moves, what exchanges are going to happen, but all of this is laborious, instead you use some higher level heuristics, like empty lanes, doubled pieces, and so on. in poker, instead of counting all the possible combinations of someone's range, you can visualize a 2d table with his range, and take a guess, it's goes from minutes of work to instant. in puyo puyo instead of calculating how pieces are going to act like mechanically, you can start making shapes with symmetry, and nice aesthetics.
