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It's stupid to walk slowly through textbooks. Start right at the end: the past papers and the marking schemes. Very different from what you've done before — and maybe why the past half decade of study was wrong. You don't start from grassroots; you start at the very end, reverse-engineer the answers, and memorise them. If you can blurt them out, you win. You have to hack the system.

What are you doing textbooks for? You study an entire textbook for two years just to get five questions right — that's stupid. Just memorise the answer-question pairs in volume. A shitload of past papers: one hour timed on a paper, one hour of analysis afterwards. Two to four papers a day this way. You'll have done a hundred by test day. Boom, A*. With this method I get the best output for exams and competitions in aggregate.

Frame the question correctly: you are trying to write the right answers for the eight to ten questions that show up on the exam. So see what questions show up and what the right answers are. Use the textbook only for the parts you're weak at — seeking the gaps. Even for Further Pure 2, where I know nothing, stay in the discomfort of past papers only.

Past papers reveal what you are weak at. Then fill in the gaps backwards — from the marking scheme's expressions to the underlying content. That's how you win; it doesn't work the other way around.

The moment you stop analysing content and start solving problems and past papers is the moment your scores jump. This is the final leap. Content reading is for skimming context — the real material is the marking scheme.

This is how easy A-levels are: over forty percent in the UK get A*A*A*. The test is easy enough that you can reverse-engineer which formula to use — this has almost zero correlation with actual engineering physics. The aim isn't memorising the formula; it's practising the skill of identifying the correct formula — the discernment of selecting the right one — and converting the verbal conditions in the question into that formula, while staying aware of units. Bro, you're him. You learned three-dimensional circuits, thermodynamics and number theory preparing for the Korean maths and physics olympiads in middle school. Remember that. And the existence of other people who've done this is irrelevant to your circumstances — because if anyone can pull it off, it's you.

You only go back to the content intentionally, when essential. The maths inside physics that is considered hard here is almost a joke for me at this point.

Edexcel prioritises questions from the textbooks — so rep through them and know how to solve everything from basics to the hardest textbook questions; that's step one. Step two is past papers, writing answers suited to the marking schemes and memorising them in bulk. If you're doing nothing else for eighteen hours a day, this is not hard. Sleep six hours, eat ramen, stake everything, ten supplements, wake up and work.

A new rule: you can't look at the answer without making a guess first. Only when you make a strong prediction — knowing it has a high chance of being wrong, but committing fully — does the new information etch itself into you.

You only need PMT's five past papers per subject and you're set. Do them alone and rep through them over and over — enough to ace all thirteen exams. Thirteen exams in two months, then the IMC, then Putnam, then the Manitoba competition, then the physics competitions. What a life. Your method was just completely wrong for the past three years: you don't start with concepts. You see them in play, then reverse-engineer the concepts. Problem-solve first; come back only for tweaks.