I totally get that feeling like you’ve forgotten everything you just learned. It’s completely normal:
It’s easy to watch or read some information and for it to not stick. A vast majority of the learning comes from trying to implement something, failing, noticing where your assumptions were incorrect, and wrestling with this new information until it fits cleanly in your mental models.
The problem with many online tutorials is that they make sense enough that you don’t really question your ability to follow along. That’s precisely why these repeated, small exercises of struggling just enough to learn new hard-won lessons (those are the ones that really stick).
Don’t worry! It’s not about “not being smart enough to get it” as much as showing up every day to do a little more, and get 1% better every day. Over the weeks and months, your competency will grow like compound interest and you’ll genuinely wonder how they never made sense before. There’s never an ultimate sense of completion as much as:
“Welp, yeah I totally get A, B, & C …but time to figure out E
…oh woah, what’s this D concept?!
…yeah E makes sense now!”