I started to raise my game by a combination of reading and meeting elderly mentors who shared their expertise. Then I read, and read and read for a long time, with learning about fishkeeping operating as escapism, probably as people use Gaming now. I didn't have many tanks and was in a high stress lifestyle, and that was my bubble I could look at.
The next level for me came with fish club membership, where I met an entire other wave of older people with cool projects they were happy to discuss. Then I met a wave of people younger than me who also knew their stuff, and it was the exchange with other people that taught me. I'm still not an expert, but I can discuss with the big kids. There's an Irish expression, an old one that says I may not be a scholar, but I've met the scholars on their way out of school.
Now, using the net, I get to talk with a lot of the real experts. I look for pdfs of scientific papers that interest me. I still read everything I can.
In many ways, the net can make us choose ignorance. It's a rigid teacher. You have to know what you want to learn to be able to feed the right questions into a search engine. I think we still can profit from older books like the Baensch Atlas series of of 40 years ago, as they show us a breadth we may not know exists. They're unbeatable bathroom reading, species by species - even the ones you will never see can teach you general ideas you might choose to use.
People aren't unlike the internet. You have to learn a little to access a lot. If you go to conventions, conferences, club speakers, etc, you can learn a lot. This forum is a hybrid. You can read past threads, or talk with people. What they do or have done in their lives crosses over with what we discuss here. How does a medical researcher approach things? A teacher? Or, when I got into fish, how did a factory worker do research? Aquarists come from all walks of life and all social classes, and we're all different. We need to listen to each other and be open to adapting.
My first mentors were generally wrong in a lot of what they taught. They were chasing the balanced aquarium, and it's a diehard myth in our hobby. Learning a system that didn't work was no problem. They shared how they were trying to make it work. Plus they discussed how it wasn't working, and in the end, were the ones who started us on the water changes approach. You have to avoid all gurus. Your peers decide who an expert is, and those who announce themselves as experts are probably over-estimating their expertise. There are too many brilliant minds doing things we have to adapt to for anyone to rest on whatever they see as their laurels. You just have to try to keep up.
You meet on the common ground and see what you can learn. Books, articles, papers, conferences, clubs, cold beers, going fishing, listening - it all adds up if you want it to. It's the same as anything else.
