I've applied it to my studies as well. You will achieve little by learning a bit of everything. There is always one area of knowledge you are urgently lacking in, that you should hyperfocus on, in order to alleviate the information bottleneck of the system you are working on. It's the same as in the book: the teacher is always whittling down the incoherent problem space to the critical piece of wisdom that the protagonist then has to discover on his own.