Often I will favor one side too much and either understand things at a very shallow level because I'm just memorizing facts, or will get stuck on things way too long because I'm just brute forcing the ideas into my head by trial and error. It depends on the subject, but I find a better way is to learn is to switch between different ways as you're learning a new concept or field. This means reading some wikipedia, then trying to figure out the problem on your own, then watching a youtube video, then asking for help, then trying the problem on your own again etc.
A good example is a basic concept of integration in calculus. You might need to learn it in a class or because you've always wanted to know calculus, whatever. So pop open:
Integral - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and read for ten minutes. If you're like me you'll know you've gone off the rails when you start reading about how Newton would pierce his own eyeball for optics research.
But you might see how integration is really good at calculating the area under a curve. You might say, "Fuck Archimedes I can figure that out.". Then you spend 15 minutes iteratively calculating the area ex:
and think, "Ok this sucks balls, there has to be a better way."
You may then look at wikipedia and get totally lost in the properties section and that's when you switch to youtube and watch a video from the first pretty girl you see.
At some point between starting the video and switching to 'brunette girls twerking' you may understand the concepts a bit and try again and boom, you've got a solution to the area under y=x^2 for a given distance because one of the videos you saw did that.
You then try to expand that to y=1/x and something is wrong. So you phone a friend and he shows you your algebra is shit and where you're wrong and also you've glossed over a few important parts of it.
From then it's just a matter of adding to that core knowledge.
