[pfortuny]

This is exactly why drills exist: to make reasoning mechanic. The same as in the military... You can only decide (know) if you have the basics memorized to the core, and this requires... boredom in most of us.

I graduated in mathematics. Proving that Projective Space is a noetherian scheme is not exactly a thrilling challenge. But you have to go through the motions if you want to be able to "think" about algebraic varieties.

Same in any other field of "knowledge".