<p>thanks.</p>
<p>1) The reason I asked about contests was is it a measure of your natural talent in mathematics and physics or is it mostly based off of practice and hard work? Like, I can do those problems, but I don’t have enough practice to be able to do it well enough for higher contests like usamo. Like how essential is natural talent in succeeding in physics and math like prominent scientists like Einstein or Feynman?</p>
<p>2) As for self studying, so basically, if you look at the problems and you can do them then that means that you understand the physics in the book right? And I just use a bunch of other texts to cover whatever topic is missing in one book that is in another? And the fastest way to do physics is to just finish a chapter and do the problems and move on gradually like that?
And if I want to like want to understand the conceptual idea behind it I can just side-read some other book?</p>