True, but I was adding value in two ways:
- I'm not a specialist on the subject; I'm just an interested reader of the subject. As such, reinventing the wheel is very useful to me as it grants me something more important than basic knowledge, it grants me insight and understanding. The word "understand" itself, to me, is very reveling once you try to break it up. Understanding something is to stand under it, like a car, for example. Looking at a car from outside is one thing, but lifting it and taking a look under it from the bottom is much more reveling; it gives you much more insight on how it works. So, deconstructing information and constructing it again, maybe in different ways, gives you insight on the various relationship between its elements, how they interact, and their relative importance in the grand scheme of things. It's like... you get the idea.
- By internalizing the information through deconstructing and reconstructing the information, I'm also adding value by adding my own connections to the subject. This is related to something being real or not. If something is big and real (truly part of reality), it usually has lots of connections to things all around us. Scholars just prove something is real and follow the leads that are beneficial to them. There could be many more connections and applications in reality that they don't touch upon either because they don't know about them or because they don't care about them; but you can highlight those connections because you know and care about those other aspects of life. For example, the topic I've been reading about is leadership; and I've found so many strong connections to it's principles in Islamic teachings. I've never read any discussion about these connection between Islam and leadership principles in western leadership literature (of course) or in scholarly works by Muslim Scholars. The only value I'm adding here is connecting the dots; there's nothing new on either side, except introducing them to each other (in a sense), but nonetheless, highlighting these connections is valuable.
- In addition to understanding it better, you tend not to forget it because you internalize it by anchoring it to lots of other information you know. Information that is connected to many pieces of already-internalized-information in your brain tends not to be forgotten easily, like a building that is at the intersection of many streets, you pass by it many times a day regardless of where you are going, so you never forget where it is.
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