Richard Feynman is a great example to illustrate how one should go about learning. In an interview (available in a YouTube video) he expresses that his curiosity about the world and what made learning about how things work was spurred by conversation with his father. During his childhood, his father take regular walks with him ask him different questions about the world and how it works . He also inspired him to make observations about how things are put together and make interpretations about how they fit into to the greater scheme of things. He particular gift was that he could highly complicated subjects in physics and make understandable to everyday laypeople. The various videos available about Feynman are highly enlightening.