Overstanding the Understanding

It is an intrinsic property of an anonymous blog that of not sharing too much infos.
It is undeniable though that the most average of the average readers can rightly guess a simple part of my life: I'm an uneducated guy trying my best to be at least decent, knowledge wise.

During this walk on the impervious road of learning stuff I came across a doubt that is haunting me ever since: is understanding things with a lot of effort in a time-consuming way still understanding?

There is a shitload of definitions for the concept of "intelligence" and I don't want to discuss 'em. My question is just this: if it takes me a lot of time to get something, to really master some concept, is it understanding?
I spent months learning stuff that other people get in few weeks. Yeah, in the end I know the same thing as these "others" but doesn't the simple fact that I wasted centuries to land at the same result put me in a lower category?

The media always show geniuses as incredible persons.
In my opinion a genius is just a faster person, an Usain Bolt of brain. A genius works on more solutions at the same time, more solutions than those of normal people, and works them out faster.

Is there some hope that my characteristic time for understanding will become more efficient?
Is it possible that longer time corresponds to deeper analysis?
Sometimes I think that a clever person can, by mere intuition or instinct, reject all the useless things and is able to dive directly into the heart of the problem. On the other hand people like me are stuck into a state of confusion and cannot easily discriminate "efficient thinking" from "scumbag thinking". Et voilà: another wannabe explanation for the different learning time.

I am not preaching My Truth, on the contrary I am pursuing some kind of helpful scheme that can convince me of not being complete useless.
I'd like to leave this post as an enormous bunch of open questions.