It can definitely be helpful to take a top-down approach in planning out your overarching learning goals.

However, the learning itself has to occur bottom-up. Especially in math. Math is a skill hierarchy, and if you cannot execute a lower-level skill consistently and accurately, you will not be able to build more advanced skills on top of it.

I wrote about this recently here if you're interested: https://www.justinmath.com/how-to-learn-machine-learning-top...