There was a thread a while back about this exact topic, and someone mentioned that John Carmack doesn't know SQL or anything about relational databases. True masters are rarely generalists.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/457916010234777600
How can someone accomplish so much and not know anything about SQL/RDBMS. Pretty surprising though.
Instead of spending time learning SQL, which he'd never use while creating a game, he only learned and practiced the skills he used for games. It's incidental that a lot of those skills are fairly universal and low-level, which gives us the false impression that Carmack is a generalist.
There's a universe of programmers that don't work in the LAMP stack (including me) because it doesn't suit what they are trying to accomplish.
When I first joined HN about 6 months ago I couldn't comprehend 80% of the material. I remember browsing through and thinking it all looked like Assembly code. It felt great to be surrounded by such brilliant minds, which is why I kept coming back, but I did feel like a lost puppy. Now, months later, I don't yet consider myself knowledgable enough to be posting comments (this is probably my 5th comment), necessarily, but it feels great to now be able to follow at least 50% of the content. This is the result of two things: a, Browsing HN pretty much daily and b, Programming more, focusing on the things I don't already know.
There aren't many lessons to be learned in your comfort zone. Good luck!