You could ask them. But someone got to that level first, how did they do that?

Let's suppose my goal is to become so cool that I could code StarCraft 3 during a weekend... without all the textures and levels and music and movies; just with some sample data, so my minions can later provide the rest. This would make me rather happy. :D

I could just spend one weekend doing my best, which obviously would not be enough. Then I could reflect on what was wrong. What was really slowing me down. I could try to research a solution for that (there is always a high prior probability that someone else already did it), or try to solve the problem myself. If I found I was missing some specific skill, I would focus on improving that skill.

The next test weekend, I could start again from the very beginning -- more precisely, I would not reuse the specific code that I wrote the previous weekend; however, if in meantime I have prepared some useful library for myself, I would use that. The idea is that I am not unnecessarily handicapping myself; I am just assuming that what I did previously was wrong, so I am not going to build on my mistakes, but to do it right. Also, by always starting again I could get some feedback on whether this weekend I was really more effective than the previous one.