Your ability to effectively learn from input largely depends on extracting the principles that underlie the tacit knowledge being presented.
Tacit knowledge is “knowledge that is difficult to extract or articulate—as opposed to conceptualized, formalized, codified, or explicit knowledge—and is therefore more difficult to convey to others through verbalization or writing. “
Though I would argue that tacit knowledge can indeed be communicated through language, just not through explicit means. This means that a teacher or a communicator of information may be subconsciously signalling pieces of tacit knowledge without deliberately spelling it out.
Tacit knowledge is born from principles rather than being a solid Thing that can be replicated. It is intuition and a felt sense of Doing that arises out of having foundations and prerequisites established and mastered.
If you don’t understand a piece of tacit knowledge, you likely don’t have the right prerequisites or foundations in place. When you do have the prerequisites established, the tacit knowledge makes sense and it may seem like an “aha!” moment once you get it. This is because the expert has gone through tons of experimentation and iteration which the novice has not. The expert has had many iterations to continually adapt and experiment their foundations to a specific way that is following a path of least resistance. Perhaps the expert knows how to use a tool in a way the novice is five years away from getting due to a lack of iterations.
Naturally, two pieces of advice emerge: first realize that principles can be derived from tacit knowledge being presented (“why are they using the tool in this way?” “why do this in this specific order”?” ), and then effectively extract said principles from the tacit knowledge. These principles will allow you to effectively experiment and iterate to gain an even deeper understanding of the domain without cognitive overload.
When you see an expert doing something that seems unnecessary or oddly specific, ask something like “what mistake were they avoiding that beginners typically make?” You’re trying to uncover the constraint, trade-off, or failure mode the expert has learned to navigate.
One thing to note is that tacit knowledge is not typically produced consciously. It is usually derived from lots of experimentation and iteration over the course of mastery. This does not mean however that some tacit knowledge does NOT have principles it is being generated from, all tacit knowledge is born out of some principle(s); it just means pieces of tacit knowledge may be more abstract than others. For example, a certain thing an expert does may truly be unique to their personality or workflow, but it will still have an underlying principle such as “reduce inflection points in complexity” or “increase slack in the information pipeline.”
This also does not mean expertise may be generated just from principles, deliberate practice and the like are much more important, but accelerating your path through this mechanism of learning is an option.
Extract principles where you can to practice more intelligently, but also accept that some knowledge only comes through time and repetition due to abstraction.