Growing up, I didn't have a role model to take inspiration and learn from. The only strategy I knew was trial and error. The result? It was randomly hit or miss. At a certain point, I got tired of missing.
I realized pretty quickly that memorizing stuff was not my cup of tea. Instead, really understanding how things work was what I preferred and is still the case. I tested this strategy for a few years when I was still studying and it worked, for the most part. It worked for everything that didn't require any learning by heart and it didn't for the rest. Lucky for me, my field of work requires really little memorizing.
Understanding things deeply makes it more interesting. This builds a narrative that I tend to remember better. What I'm not saying is that I remember everything because I built the narrative for it. I still need to go over things I haven't looked into for a while but keeping notes helps refresh back up the memory.
The downside is the time it takes to understand something new. The most convenient explanation isn't always available. I'm not always fully focused. Often times, I need to go over the same thing several times to get the point.
On the long run though, the benefits of this strategy outweigh the downsides significantly. I don't prepare for technical interviews anymore since I understand most of what I do. I tend to tackle new challenges with more patience. I don't panic when presented with a hard problem as I know I only need to understand the problem well enough to solve it.
At the end of the day, this is my strategy. This is what works for me.