An exercise: pick a transaction and walk it.

Not reading. Activity. Open mempool.space or Etherscan. Pick any recent transaction with a few interesting properties (a high gas fee, a smart contract call, a transfer between exchanges). Walk every field. Identify the "from," the "to," the value, the gas, the nonce, the status, the block. Click through to the addresses. Look at their history. This is the muscle of being able to verify anything you read in this space. Build it now. It compounds.