My personal hypothesis is that one requires a certain amount of maturity to develop the metacognitive skill set that allows one to be autodidactic and to recognize your own limitations or gaps-- and to address them somehow.
You do have to build feedback loops into your learning system to uncover those things.
I wasn't very good at that until I was about age 25 or so. There were two reasons for that: 1) I didn't really see any NEED for it-- I was either learning it or I wasn't, was how I looked at things, and if I was learning in a linear fashion (which I now realize is NOT how I learn things), then gaps shouldn't exist... and 2) I didn't see how to build those feedback loops into my learning the way that I instinctively did with experimental design (e.g. this is what a 'control' is for). It took me realizing that I could use that same approach to learning to manage it well by testing against a null hypothesis.
That requires switching the null hypothesis into a front and center position on some level, though. It's not "positive" in outlook from a metacognition standpoint. It is really uncomfortable until you've matured enough to be comfortable in your own skin, and comfortable recognizing that part of your self-image is always going to be "ignorant about many things."
That was not a part of my identity that I made peace with until my 20's were over with. LOL. Until then, my learning using this mode was very much incidental and spotty-- not very deliberate.
It's fascinating to me that many of us strategize this kind of learning in many of the same ways.
I'm very eager to learn how other people do this.
