"i just bugged the hell out of my friend until i found out what commands did what."

That works great when you have a friend to bug. And nowadays, you can Google for solutions, so this kind of "I'll learn it when I need it" strategy works reasonably well.

But what doesn't work is when you have no friend to bug, and you don't have enough knowledge even to know what Google keywords you should be using. That's the point at which you really want to spend time acquiring fundamental concepts without regard for how useful they'll be in the near term.

Let's say someone was trying to learn physics, and they didn't yet know algebra. Which strategy do you think would work better: making a dedicated effort to learn algebra first, or diving in to physics and only learning algebra as they needed it?