Understand the topic and practice a lot? Well, yeah. That is good as an objective, but what's missing is a way to get to the point where you actually understand the thing.
"Insight" as used by the author is just a fancy (and misused) word for understanding. "To succeed you can't just memorize the formula; you have to understand how it works." Is that really such an insightful thing to conclude?
The most valuable part of the article for me is where he points out that a lot of hard-working but unintelligent students write copious notes without ever doing the mental gymnastics to understand what it is they're writing down.
