It reminds me a bit of the motivation behind fast.ai, that you should get your hands dirty with the things you care about instead of learning the tough things until you're ready.

I found it easier to learn things like stats, linear algebra, and calculus once I had a personal application to it. Even something that I love in Reinforcement Learning, I would sometimes get sleepy reading pages and pages from the Sutton and Barto book, but as soon as I worked on a coding exercise, I could spend hours actively participate with trying to solve the problem.