MIT Challenge: 4 year MIT CS curriculum in 1 year (2012)

This guy comes up quite often and can we just say that this is very impressive and not everybody could do this.

I've seen tons of articles on HN and reddit about "how he did it and you can too" with different study techniques, such as skim, then re-read thoroughly and write a synopsis line for each paragraph and then at the end of a chapter write an explanation of the stuff. If you can't write a simple explanation (without referring to notes), then redo the reading. Or something along those lines and I don't see how this makes you get through the curriculum faster, or makes it easier to push yourself to study alone for hours everyday.

There are literally 1.000s of students completing this or similar curriculum every year, and basically none of them do it in less than 4 years.

Maybe it is this guy who is just really good at studying.

I don't see the swim test anywhere on that list.