How to Be a Know-It-All
On the flip side, this approach to learning means you know next to nothing beyond the dozen first bits of terminology or buzzwords for each new topic, much less the concepts. The moment you finally meet someone interested in discussing one of these things, its going to be immediately apparent the basis of your knowledge is a brief article&#x2F;book or a weekend watching videos on youtube. Furthermore, these are all going to be little self-contained treatises without any prerequisites -- they are written for a general audience, so you are completely limited to, as the article describe it, the appearance of mastery to people who don&#x27;t know better.<p>What&#x27;s worse is that you seriously have to question the qualifications of any single source claiming to be a valid resource for a wide range of topics. Even if the individual course is written&#x2F;taught by an expert, they are paid or motivated by another entity with their own set of bureaucracy and expectations. What works for learning tennis isn&#x27;t going to produce the same class format as what works for learning Film Scoring (I&#x27;m looking at you Masterclass, for producing that joke of a class).<p>In my mind, the best approach to learning requires you to initially commit to either a top-down or bottom-up strategy. If you want to master the topic, you should go bottom-up; focus initially on theory and gradually more on practice&#x2F;experience. If you want to ramp up as quickly as possible, go top-down and experience something for a more general audience to get a taste. If you like it, you can keep pursuing that route or commit towards a more bottom-up approach, which provides a higher ceiling albeit on a longer timeline. But don&#x27;t go to a general resource like the one in the article, go directly to the expert&#x27;s material, first-hand, for the raw, unadultered version.