This is a great discussion. It took me months to create this notebook. Not months of progress, but months of continuous failure. The difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is the ones that succeed didn’t give up! 
Also, I spend at least 50% of every day learning and/or practicing new things, and have done so since I made that commitment at the age of 18. (Nowadays it’s about 90% of my day). I don’t watch TV or play computer games or get lost in social media so I maximize the time I spend on things I care about. So over time I’ve gotten faster at doing stuff, since I’ve been practicing and learning lots.
I don’t have a “from scratch” notebook to share, since I’m continuously refactoring and experimenting within one notebook, and what you see is the result. But @radek has done a good job in earlier posts documenting some of the kinds of tools and approaches I use.
One of our MOOC students, Louis Monier, is known as the “father of internet search” - he was the CTO of the first big web search company (Alta Vista). He’s a pretty smart guy! He told me he had watched the part 1 (2017) videos so many times that he knew much of them off by heart. He also practiced on a home deep learning project whilst watching the videos, and IIRC he spent something like 6 months working on that. If Louis needs to study this much, then the rest of us should probably expect to work even harder if we want to master the material.
Today, Louis is the head of the AI Lab at AirBnB. So I guess the hard work can pay off… 