How to tackle it? To me there are either two ways: when you are trying to learn the thing XYZ you are seeking, drill down to the first thing you don’t understa

How to tackle it? To me there are either two ways: when you are trying to learn the thing XYZ you are seeking, drill down to the first thing you don’t understand and consult a lower level resource. Continue until you reach a level you understand. And the second way is: Re-learning “all” of essential math and then going back to XYZ. I don’t think the second step is feasible, as you cannot possibly learn everything in a breadth-first kind of way until you are deep enough to learn the (now level-adjacent) topic XYZ. But for strategy 1, the question is 1) how to identify the problem that you are lacking (e.g. how to isolate math gibberish into a concrete concept) and 2) how to find a good resource to learn and practice this concept at this level? I do struggle with this and sometimes randomly learn some lower concept again but notice later it did not help me in the end and just left me with a million untied knots that were infeasible for me to entangle.