Speed

As I continue to find ways to build my mental model of things - I realise that agility to understanding of things relies very much on an effective mental model.

In my opinion, an effective mental model should be at a level of abstraction that allows you to make sense of all instances of that model for as many of the possible situations as possible.

Once you have decided on abstraction level and identified the objects in your model - it then acts as an anchor for you to quickly make sense of all different instances as you come across them.

Without this anchor, low level instances or variation of things that are too definitive or specific will otherwise be meaningless and chaotic. And as you continuously learn and research about objects in your model - overall agility to understand the subject matter increases.

Of course, that's the ideal way of learning a new subject. However, more often than not, things that we come across already exists at a low level; at its end state - because they have to be implemented already before we can see or experience them physically.

Therefore, to demystify and reverse engineer it - you will have to experience a variety of the instances and identify the commonalities between each one and then work out an appropriate abstraction - very much like OOP if you ask me.

It's no wonder almost every book about OOP starts by saying that this programming paradigm is closest to how our brain models the world.