Most people think learning is about arriving at the correct answer.

It isn’t. Getting the answer right is a surface outcome; understanding why that answer is right is the thing that actually changes you. Memorised procedures, copied solutions, and rehearsed steps create the appearance of competence, but they collapse the moment the problem shifts even slightly. A different framing, a new constraint, a reordered graph, and the learner is suddenly stranded not because the problem is harder, but because nothing underneath was ever built.

When you understand why something works, you are no longer dependent on the original path that produced the solution. You can reconstruct it from scratch. You can bend it to fit new conditions. You can tell something is wrong before you know exactly what is wrong, because the result violates the internal logic you’ve built. That feeling is often called intuition, but intuition is not talent or instinct; it is understanding that has been compressed, internalised, and made fast.

This is why copying answers is such a dangerous shortcut. It trains recognition without reasoning. You learn to reproduce shapes without grasping the structure that generates them. In compositing, this shows up immediately: a node tree copied from a tutorial works perfectly on the demo plate, then falls apart the moment the lighting changes, the perspective changes, or the element changes. The artist who memorised the steps freezes. The artist who understands why each operation exists adapts without panic.

Real learning happens in the uncomfortable pause where you interrogate the solution itself. Why this method works. What assumptions it relies on. What would break if those assumptions were false. Whether the same result could be reached another way. That friction is not inefficiency; it is the cost of building a model that survives variation. Speed without structure feels good early and fails under pressure.

In any technical craft like compositing, mathematics, programming, or life itself problems do not repeat cleanly. Only understanding does. If you can’t explain why an answer is right, you don’t own it yet. And when conditions change, only what you own can move with you.