There is a similarity between the growth of knowledge and the accumulation of wealth. There are many maxims such as "the rich get richer," "they who have get," "it takes money to make money." One way to make this point is to compare the amount of interest earned on small or large savings accounts. If the interest rate is 10% and you have only $10 in your account, your interest is $1; but if you have $10,000, your interest is $1,000. Another way to make the point is to watch your wealth grow if you simply double it every year 1- 2- 4- 8- 16- 32- 64- 128- 256- 512- 1,024- 2,048- 4,096- 8,192- 16,384- 32,768- 65,536- 131,072- 262,144- 524,288- 1,048,576. Notice that, at first, the growth is very slow and it takes ten years to reach a thousand, but by twenty years, you're over a million.
You can think of your memory as a bank into which you deposit information, and the rate at which your wealth of knowledge grows is illustrated in the graph
What this graph shows is that, when you first start to study some subject, progress is very slow. Indeed, many people quit because they do not seem to be making any real progress. But if you stick with it, learning will get progressively easier. The reason why this is true is "positive transfer". Knowledge that was learned with difficulty earlier is available to facilitate later learning. And if you become an expert, you can pick up in just a few minutes what it may take the beginner many hours to learn.
At least to this time, there simply is no short-cut, no easy way to get past the slow, arduous stage. Some years ago, a person claimed that a worm could "learn" by eating a worm that had been trained for many hours, but this claim proved to be a hoax. Every now and then, a new "smart" pill appears on the market, purporting to speed up the learning process. The fact is that almost everyone gets off to a slow start, but, with perseverance, almost anyone can become an expert.