I find that my brain has become rusty and myself impatient, distracted,
internally rushed to get things done. When I encounter something that needs
slowing down, deliberating, calculating, etc, I just mentally skim over it and
convince myself that "I get it". 

But I don't get it because I know that if I had to repeat it back in my own
words or write an example illustrating it or use it in any way I'd get stuck at
the very start. I know what it means to understand something and this is not it.

I was struggling with some arithmetic algorithm yesterday and I just wanted to
brute force my way through it but I could see that it was getting me nowhere. I
finally did the obvious: slowed down and took out pen and paper. I kept
repeating mistakes but at a slower rate and each time I gained more
understanding and now after an hour of doing examples on paper I feel that I can
do it with many fewer errors. 

This rushing through life's problems is killing joy of understanding things
deeply. Its like I want to first do and then reverse engineer my way back to
actually understanding what I did. But would you want to fly in a plane that was
just hacked together in a rush by a team of engineers that were sort of winging
it as they went and were now taking out fires one crush at a time?

"The unexamined life is not worth living" as saying attributed to Socrates goes.

I think a similar sentiment applies to knowledge: rushed, half-baked,
inaccurate stuff with little to no understanding is not worth doing.

Perhaps I need to do less, do it slower, do it deeper. Maybe the world won't
implode if I do less but better?