When striving to be “unconscious” serves you

Familiarization • Comprehension • Conscious Effort • Conscious Action

A key idea here is that you are not blindly memorizing solutions. You are looking at problems and learning how to build your own brain-links. Once that solid, beautiful set of links is formed, it can easily be pulled up into working memory when you need to. With enough practice independently solving the problem (not looking at the solution!), each

The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits.

Metacognition—your knowledge of what you know—is a harsh mistress. As a beginner in any discipline, you not only lack skill; you lack a larger sense of what you don’t yet know.