Life's way of teaching is very different from what we are used to in schools.
Schools teachers you, take tests, 2-3 times that's it. You pass, good. You fail, oh poor you.
Life is little different. It test you, you learn. You learn not to make those mistake again. It again take test and keep taking until you don't learn it the best way.
This testing/learning loop never stops in during Life time.
The Story
I remember in my first year of my engineering(2020), I wanted to dive in ML.
The mistake I did was to learn it the school's way. I signed up to Andrew Ng's course on Deep Learning.
What I understood?
Nothing. Which isn't surprising as I didn't even know python back then let alone what ML even was for me.😔
Result. I got bored. I gave up. Don't remember much of the things except some basics written somewhere in my notes. Not until this time after 6 months, when I realizing I was ready for Deep learning and had much more firm grasp of concepts in ML and few libraries most commonly used by ML and Data Science practitioner.
Just Learn Enough
Learning something new don't really require you to go through all of it at once. It's better to take small steps and get yourself familiarized first with the background.
What's important for you is to Just learn enough to get you started and take carefully planned steps. As the time progress you'll learn even more new things along the path with its purpose.
Want to learn a new programming language. Just learn how to create a new variable, print statement, functions and classes and maybe some special constructs the language offers. That's it. More than enough. No go solve your problems. Whenever you get stuck,
Just Google it up, and let the exploration begin.
Or maybe find a replicating example and evolve the solution to meet your needs.
In the long run?
Of course just learning enough won't help for too long. You yourself might feel a need to drive in.
What the technique does is to get you started as soon as possible and keep you interested. That means at one point you need to get up and learn even more complex stuff than what you had started with.
But, This time you will have a purpose and lot more experience.
Just like me who realized it's completely normal if I start with Deep learning now, I'll be lot more comfortable. Moreover it's necessary for me to drive in, learn what happens at each step of training and things which will make me a lot better in training ML model.
One quick tip.
Keep a daily log of what you learned, the book you read. A log help you go back in time, see where you began and how fast you came.
Knowledge compounds. As Warren Buffett says,
“That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”
Over time you will see the difference in yourself.
Keep Learning.
