Total, utter bewilderment. You find some sources, start reading, and tinkering and experimenting, and some of the bewilderment seems to lift, only to come back in spades when you run up against a scenario you didn’t anticipate, or a major technicality which you’d overlooked. It can be frustrating; it can become a huge time-sink. I absolutely love it.

I’m talking about jumping feet-first into a new area of knowledge or expertise, and trying to “climb your way up” through torrents of information, advice and opinion so that you build your own “world view” of the domain in question and possibly, if you invest the right time in the right places, become an expert (or at least a competent amateur) in the field in question.

I think most people have done it at least once in their lives - if only when studying at university or learning a trade. I can immediately think of 3 times that I’ve done it - getting used to the realm of literary criticism at UCL, first learning my way around the internet, perl and linux around 1998, and properly acquainting myself with the rich and impossibly complicated world of independent music, starting last year.

The reason I’m writing about this feeling now is that I’ve just embarked on a new “problem domain” - money.

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