Yes, of course you can’t level up just by reading a book; experience is the only way. The key thing - as you know, if you like the book - is that this book provides a coherent framework for thinking about data systems that engineers can fit their particular experience into. That “weird race condition” becomes less mysterious when it’s framed in terms of concepts like write skew or phantoms; joining two streams together becomes a problem about time and ordering. And so on. In fact the reason it’s such a great book is that you can read it with not much experience or background beyond basic database knowledge, absorb a lot of the ideas, and then keep coming back to it as your experience grows and you encounter new kinds of scenarios in your day to day work.