The role of rote practice, while overused in schools, is probably underused by adults. An appropriately-sized amount of concrete practice or experience can be incredibly important for getting some actual data which will serve as the foundation for knowledge, and then insight. Skipping this step will generally lead to the kinds of failure we see when someone has clearly only read about something but never actually tried what they read, or when someone tries to reason about a domain they aren't familiar with by analogizing it to their own. The high-level ideas sound OK, but because no two domains are ever the same, there's always some concrete way in which the ideas won't work.