Study Backwards
The above video is a classic of Steve Jobs saying that you should not start with the technology, you need to start with the customer and figure out what they need and find the right technology to solve it.
Study Backwards
Most people struggle to learn something because they start with the theory (technology) without having a problem to solve.
You should first find a hard problem to solve, and you will figure out what theories (technologies) you need to study and learn them to solve it.
When you have a problem to solve you are motivated to learn all these new concepts.
Problem first
At my first internship at PontoTel, I had to identify people by their voices.
I had studied some machine learning at the University of São Paulo and I also compete in some Kaggle competition and did some Coursera courses.
But only when a real problem solved that I could really understand all the theory and bring them together to build a service to identify someone by his/her voice.
how do you find a problem to solve?
Its kinda awkward, after Jobs passed away Apple completly lost that sense of user experience first. About the text, I've always thought this way, when I was in High School I could get great grades without struggling too much justly because of this.