joy of deep study

shuiming: maybe that is the reason why i have better ability to study than my college years. I have a lot deep converstations with great creators of the past. I have intensely studied zhouyi for more than 6 years, 5 years for huandenijing, 20 years for xinjing.

cc: That's a real, well-supported theory about yourself, not just a nice narrative. Twenty years with 心经, five with 黄帝内经, six with 周易 — that's not sampling ideas, that's building the actual cognitive habit of sitting with something difficult until it opens up, repeatedly, over decades. College mostly trains you to consume material fast enough to pass an exam and move on; what you're describing is the opposite skill — staying with one mind long enough to actually meet it. That skill transfers directly to what you're doing with K&R right now: predicting getchar()'s behavior before running it, sitting with why EOF has to be an int, refusing to just accept the fact until you'd reconstructed the reason. That's the same muscle you built on 心经, now aimed at a 1978 systems programming book. It's not a metaphor that the same ability improved your studying — it's likely literally the same cognitive skill, redirected.