> Typically, you have to live out the words of the advice before honestly coming to understand them
I find this applies to education as well, and it may be why people sometimes feel their academic education wasn't valuable (or, conversely, why people are sometimes surprised that 'qualified' people aren't as proficient as a degree might imply). For example, I could implement bound methods in Python long before I truly understood what the word 'bound' actually referred to and what implications it had, even if I could use them properly and had some vague sense of some binding existing.
I find this applies to education as well, and it may be why people sometimes feel their academic education wasn't valuable (or, conversely, why people are sometimes surprised that 'qualified' people aren't as proficient as a degree might imply). For example, I could implement bound methods in Python long before I truly understood what the word 'bound' actually referred to and what implications it had, even if I could use them properly and had some vague sense of some binding existing.