My journey started years ago by wanting to understand the DQN paper. Hintons coersera course was a nice start and after that it was just going down the rabbit hole which are citations. It takes a lot of effort in the beginning because every single sentence you read will introduce new topics to you that you never heard before. But after a while these become second nature and you won't spend any second thoughts on them anymore. It just takes preserverance and will imo.