One reasons Prot himself was able to become a bonafide Emacs Guru in just a few years is because he's the kind of person who reads manuals. He speaks highly of the included docs, and often credits them for his knowledge.
And he wasn’t even a programmer by trade. AFAIK he used to work in Brussels at the European Commission, he started using Emacs for his writing and taught himself Emacs Lisp as a first programming language, probably by diving deep into the Emacs manual.
