I agree in principle that learning things can be tedious at times, but... learning, memory retention and reward system are very tightly integrated. It's almost laughably ineffective to learn despite pain, relative to learning with joy. You know there are people who could complete your song-memorizing ordeal in 1/10th of the time, not feeling any major frustration? Because most of the work is happening effortlessly, the song being sung in their heads on autopilot, reconstructing and optimizing?

I won't claim that toughing it out isn't worthy or that there always is a better way, however it seems clear that top performers in every field tend not to have to tough it out very much. This is unfair but not smart to ignore.