Persistence in terms of both an operating system and in life, takes work. Going through this operating systems course we learned about how persistence enables us to save the state of a system, through writing to a something that survives power state changes of your program (or operating system).
The same is true for things we learned in life, we need to over come the challenge of learning new concepts and saving that information for new use. Thankfully our brain works a little different than a computer and typically commits concepts we learned automatically. But sometimes it takes repeated attempts at learning a concept to really commit that knowledge to permanent storage in our brain. Think of it as maybe first pass of learning a concept you’re only able to service tier 1 priority concepts. But given time and going back to refresh, tier 2 and tier 3 concepts are able to be absorbed by our brain. And sometimes things we learn sometimes take a random thought or interruption to remember what we once learned, sort of like needing to XOR something out of parity data.
Overall, Operating Systems and life have a lot in common, key amongst them is persistence. In order to learn anything and truly understand a concept it takes persistence, both to understand and commit it to permanent knowledge.