True mastery comes not from consuming endless information, but from actively compressing, testing, and applying knowledge. Self-educated geniuses like Feynman, Franklin, da Vinci, and Malcolm X demonstrate that the key to lasting understanding lies in reflection, simplification, and iterative refinement. By embracing the discomfort of ignorance, confronting cognitive dissonance, and transforming ideas into physical or practical forms, learners can move beyond superficial understanding into deep, adaptable intelligence. The disciplined cycle of learning, writing, teaching, finding gaps, and refining transforms passive consumption into creative action, producing not just knowledge, but clarity, problem-solving ability, and the capacity to explain ideas with elegance.