We are all born ignorant. Life's mysteries give meaning and passion to life. If I knew everything, I'd have to find new passion, so I'm grateful I'm ignorant. There has never been nor ever will be anything wrong with not knowing.<p>Assuming you're studying alone, so it's not fear based on māna (comparing yourself to others without taking in the back story of all parties being compared):<p>Generic fear is recognition of the unknown. Recognizing when there is something to learn is a beneficial skill to learn. Recognizing this is how fear works, the emotional response ceases its control when the logical mind understands what is going on and how to deal with this unknown; learning is an opportunity for a reward.<p>Learning is pattern matching our previous understanding (neighboring concepts) with a new idea. (And understanding the story of how that concept came to be, and what its intention is eg, leading to how it is used and in what situations.)<p>When one is learning a concept within a subject matter they are already familiar with, there are a lot of similar concepts, making the learning easy or effortless. However, when it is a new subject matter, especially if it is an atomic concept with its only neighboring understanding comes from isomorphic concepts that exist in other domains, it can take a bit more work to really "get it".<p>A trick I employ when learning is I forget time. I forget any goals. If I'm learning a thing so I can solve an issue in a issue tracker, then I will feel pressured on time. But the harder or more foreign the subject is that needs to be learned, the slower one needs to go to really get it.<p>If I am okay taking a day or even days pondering a new idea with the patience of learning the concept for it itself, then the learning process will be enjoyable instead of stressful.<p>If you have "all the time in the world" to learn, then it becomes easy to recursively dive depth-first into the concept and it's prerequisite concepts, as well as its neighboring concepts. Instead of learning a single concept, why not learn an ecosystem of concepts? This will help one retain what they've learned, make what they learn far more useful than learning a single stand alone idea, and it makes it easier to learn more of that topic. Once the first 2-4+ concepts in a domain are learned, learning anything else within that world becomes a cake walk.