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A novice might spend hours reading up on logistics and still be clueless when it comes time to understand how goods need to move around. That is because logistics is really a function of timing, sequencing, handoffs, storage, movement, and constrained decision-making. The quickest way to feel more competent, early on, is not by focusing too much on definitions, but by learning with some real-world examples. Consider one small, tangible scenario of the type, such as the journey of a product from a supplier to a warehouse to the final customer. Try to sketch that path on paper and describe the steps in your own words. Figure out what has to happen at each step so that the next one is able to happen. This makes logistics real and it trains the brain to see the order, the dependencies and the bottlenecks.
Try working with smaller examples, rather than trying to work your way through inventory, transport, warehousing and demand prediction. Work with one type of example at a time over a few days. A good place to start is with movement and handoffs. Take an object, and think about what might occur if it arrived late at a warehouse. Now trace back. Was there a route delay? Was loading inefficient? Was there paperwork that was not legible? Did it take too long to receive and put away? Working backward through a delay like that is a good habit for beginners, because it helps you identify the cause of the delay. And in the end it makes you realize that a delay is rarely just a delay. Most often it is a symptom of some other underlying problem which was overlooked or poorly understood.
One common mistake is thinking that you have to memorize the vocabulary before you can understand how everything is put together. A beginner can learn a phrase like lead time or throughput or stock rotation, then not know how to use any of it. The solution is that you need to tie each term to a motion, a location or a decision. If you learn lead time, apply it to a particular shipment and see how long the time is from start to finish. If you learn stock rotation, imagine that two shipments arrived and are on the same date, and which one should leave the warehouse first. That way the term will stick in your head and be more useful to you. A mistake that beginners can make is to assume that any delays are related to the transportation, when really it might be the receiving, picking, packing, or even the poor coordination between stages.
Work at it daily in small chunks rather than once a week for a couple of hours. For about 15 minutes think about one logistics situation. For a couple of minutes sketch the path it needs to take from its origin to its destination, and identify the decisions that will have to be made. Which ones are most sensitive to timing? Which ones need the most accurate information? Where can something go wrong, resulting in the product becoming useless for the customer? For the last few minutes of that 15 minutes, consider a situation in which one element changes. What if a pallet is damaged, or a shipment arrives late, or a storage area is completely full? Now you need to redraw the path with that situation in mind. This builds the flexibility to be able to apply it in real life and it teaches you that logistics is never static, that conditions always change, and good practice helps you keep your mind in the game.
Sometimes the reason progress seems so slow is not that you are not working hard, but that the example is just too big. Instead of considering how the whole supply chain is functioning, just focus on just getting the product to the warehouse, or just on the picking and dispatch from that warehouse. Be clear about that too. After every practice session write down one or two things you understand and a couple of things that you still do not get. You might use that as feedback. If a specific point of uncertainty shows up more than once, that is actually a good sign, as it tells you exactly what the next thing you have to read and understand is. Getting good at logistics just means knowing what your weak points are so they can be worked on, rather than just reading more and more books.
And you really start to learn when you do a situation enough that you start to see the same patterns. A bottleneck, a delay, or an inventory mismatch might seem like a very different scenario, but the questions that have to be answered are the same for every beginner. What has moved? What has not? What should have been moved already? Where is the sequence broken? Learn to answer those until they feel second nature. Then you will find that you no longer have all this disparate information, that logistics really starts to look like a system that has a rhythm and a logic to it.