Some ideas arrive like lightning—sudden, illuminating, gone before you can trace their path. Others accumulate slowly, like sediment, until one day you realize you’ve been standing on new ground.

The texture matters. How an idea arrives shapes how we hold it.

Quick vs. Slow Understanding

There’s a particular kind of understanding that comes from reading a well-written explanation. It feels complete. You nod along, following each step, and at the end you feel you get it.

But try to explain it to someone else a week later, and the understanding evaporates. It was borrowed understanding, resting on the author’s scaffolding rather than your own.

Contrast this with understanding earned through struggle:

  1. You encounter a problem
  2. Your first attempts fail
  3. You try different approaches
  4. Something clicks
  5. You see why it works

This understanding has roots. It connects to other things you know. It persists.

Implications for Learning

This suggests that the best learning resources might be the ones that make you work. Not artificially—obscurity for its own sake is just poor communication. But resources that pose questions before answers, that leave productive gaps for you to fill.

The discomfort of not-yet-understanding is the feeling of learning happening.

Code Example

Even something as simple as understanding a function benefits from this approach:

def mystery(n):
    if n <= 1:
        return n
    return mystery(n-1) + mystery(n-2)

What does this compute? Tracing it by hand—actually writing out the call tree—teaches more than being told “it’s the Fibonacci sequence.”

Ideas with texture stick. The smooth ones slip away.