“returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practice–style strain, but due to its intensity it felt like much more. Fortunately, this effort led to immediate benefits. Among other things, it allowed me to understand whole swaths of related work that had previously been mysterious. The researchers who wrote this paper had enjoyed a near monopoly on solving this style of problem—now I could join them. Leveraging this new understanding, I went on to prove a new result, which I published at a top conference in my field. This is now a new research direction open for me to explore as I see fit. Perhaps even more indicative of this strategy’s value is that I actually ended up finding a pair of mistakes in the paper. When I told the authors, it turned out I was only the second person to notice them, and they hadn’t yet published a correction. To help calibrate the magnitude of this omission, bear in mind that according to Google Scholar the paper had already been cited close to sixty times. More”