[username90]

I'm not really sure, but the thing I do most different is that I don't really trust anything. For example, in a mathematics class I wouldn't trust what they taught, instead I always tried to disprove it and I didn't use formulas I couldn't derive myself.

This is a lot of extra work, but it meant that I always had an extremely strong foundation to stand on. When I know something I really know it, and having learned this way since early school I have spent a really long time doing it so it covers quite a lot.

Also when you learn this way you don't forget, so it just compounds. There is no way a person who "cheated" by implementing for example algorithms and data structures without deriving things themselves can compete. They have spent their entire lives learning how to apply things without understanding, they would have to redo all of that to catch up.

When you know things this well then being much faster than others is not very hard. Also creating original solutions is not something scary or time consuming, it is something you've done throughout your entire life.

Anyhow, I am not sure if others can learn this way, I just know it works for me. I've tried teaching others to do it, but it didn't work that well. It might be that it was too late, I just naturally learned mathematics this way from early school so I already knew how to think about algorithms before I even started programming. I mean, calculating things by hand or in your head are the original algorithms so if you can confidently alter those as you wish then you already know the basics of programming.