Yes indeed. Outside of work, I'm an endurance sports person, so basically performance is correlated strongly with training hard and suffering. There is a saying, "Pain is weakness leaving the body", I first heard it in high school (team went on to win a state championship in a highly competitive state). When I was suffering on workouts I just pictured myself getting stronger.
OK hopefully I didn't get too far afield. To me, the analogous concept in learning, particularly in technical fields, is that "learning is ignorance leaving the mind".
In college, particularly math and physics, I /always/ focused on understanding the underlying principles. Initially it was out of fear that if I forgot the formulas, I could re-derive them. But a strange thing happened... through that process, I developed an intuition and an ability to "see" what formulas and concepts to apply when. Once I got to that point in a problem, "seeing it for what it was", finishing to the solution became busywork.
OK hopefully I didn't get too far afield. To me, the analogous concept in learning, particularly in technical fields, is that "learning is ignorance leaving the mind".
In college, particularly math and physics, I /always/ focused on understanding the underlying principles. Initially it was out of fear that if I forgot the formulas, I could re-derive them. But a strange thing happened... through that process, I developed an intuition and an ability to "see" what formulas and concepts to apply when. Once I got to that point in a problem, "seeing it for what it was", finishing to the solution became busywork.