It's surprising what you can learn by osmosis! You don't necessarily have to understand everything but you absorb over time, just like how children learn their first language I suppose
I found that following humor blogs about certain specialist area's also help a lot with the osmosis. One example is DBAreactions. I'm Dev/Ops, so naturally I have to touch on DBA tasks but not enough to get fully involved in the field. Following the humor blog and sometimes stumbling upon a joke I don't get tells me there is some knowledge that must be so common (ie important) in that field that I miss. So then a task arises for me to learn to laugh at the joke.
