Obviously everyone has the ability to learn from the start, or it'd be impossible to even learn to learn. But what have I done to improve my learning capabilities? The best kind of learning, practice, by newer considering my own knowledge as lacking for a task, but rather something I'll have to improve I get practice in learning any time I try to solve a new problem.
University does help a lot as well. Even if I definitely don't remember every fact from every course I've studied (although claiming that all is forgotten within 45 minutes would be a major exaggeration), I've been "forced" to learn a lot of different subjects within a limited time frame. In itself this means practice in learning and it also creates a large base on knowledge upon which I more easily can learn new things. Math stands out as the most important in that, as it's something that I find too tedious to learn on my own, but which is the language used in almost all technical subjects.