It seems that sometimes you don't understand something because you have made an erroneous assumption about what it is.
Sometimes too the subject can just be too complicated to understand: you lose track
of the complex structure. This is where, it seems you can tell smarter people from the less fortunate. Prior training can also help make it easier to grasp some concepts
because prior structures act as scaffolding.
But it can also be the case that you don't understand a small subject because you have not put some order into your view of it and you have in fact contradicting views about different parts of it. Or your view might be not sufficiently developed.
In such a case it is a good idea to try to write up your explanation of the subject.
It has often been said that there is no better way to understand a subject that to teach the subject, presumably because it forces you to put some order on the subject.
Without going so far as teaching the subject, writing a small documentation is a good way of putting some order. It follows that thinking is not good enough on its own.
It's like pencil and paper for a mathematician: without pencil and paper most mathematicians are far less efficient.
I do think that there are a lot of professionals out there who do not take the trouble to put some order and clarity into their concepts by writing it up.
As a technical writer I have noticed that I had to help them clear their ideas up.
I think they should have learned to do this on their own, and the gain in productivity thanks to clearer ideas would have offset the time trying to comitt it to paper.
And yet it also seems that there are some ideas that we do not know how to explain, and yet we seem to manage to deal with a lot of the problems in practice.
This can be due to the fact that the ideas are very difficult to express, given the culture at the time which does not provide the support to express these ideas.
Still that should not be used as an excuse not to try.
