In chemistry, there’s a useful concept known as the rate-determining step. This occurs when a reaction takes place over multiple steps, with the products of one reaction becoming the reagents for another. The rate-determining step is the slowest part of this chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck that ultimately defines the amount of time needed for the entire reaction to occur. Learning, I’d like to argue, often works similarly, with certain aspects of the learning problem forming a bottleneck that controls the speed at which you can become more proficient overall.
