How to learn things at 1000x the speed

Throughout my schooling and career, I’ve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got a simple question and failed miserably after spending 4h on it and finally asking the interviewer what “recursion” was. Since then I’ve created core UI components at Facebook used by billions, worked on the language spec for GraphQL and Relay, ported an optimization made popular by Haskell to JS by writing an optimizing compiler, built an extension for VSCode that has half a million installs and has been listed on multiple top 10 articles, scaled a botnet of over 2,000 bots that made money from a popular trivia game, shipped to production an IPFS inspired decentralized file server and the fastest Serverless Docker runtime, almost completed a design minor while successfully creating a brand...