So, you want to reach the higher level of thinking(learn emacs), but don't know how?

Well, lets begin. First, you need to start with the bare emacs, not choose any distro of it. If you do, its like choosing manjaro and then saying you use arch.

Now, lets start configuring, shall we?
First of all you will want to either create, or go to the .emacs.d, and create an init.el file that contains your startup config. You can also use ~/.emacs for your init.el file, if you feel like doing so. Now, lets get to configuring. Primary thing to configure in emacs are obviously shortcuts, but you can also configure other stuff, life the cursor, font, code completion, preety much anything you can think of.

At this point, if you are still commited after entering emacs, its time to turn in yor 2week notice in your job, and find a better paid job, because now you are in the higher level of thinking!

Alright, now that your out of responsibilities, its time to dive in. You can open a file with C-x C-f, which you can do by holding control, and pressing x and f in order. Shortcut syntax is very interesting overall, if you want to use shift in your shortcuts, you can do it by capitalizing the character, such as C-C(Control+Shift+C), there is also s-C(Meta/Windows/Super + Shift + C) for example, and alt as M (M-x = Alt + X)

However above I already mentioned a very important emacs shortcut, M-x. Alt + X is a shortcut that allows you to open a little command line in the minibuffer below, and execute anything from within emacs(as long as its interactive, but thats way out of scope for this post)

Simply, for example, type M-x => install-package => c-mode, and done! c-mode package will be instantly installed.
However, if you are using the function often enough, its commonly worth it to put it to a shortcut. But how do you do that?
Simply, for example:
(define-key global-map (kbd "C-c s") 'search-backward)
This defines C-c(Control + C, folowed by non longer control pressed S key), to search backwards. Simple action, yet it optimizes your workload quite abit from doing everything with the mouse.

You can also set every variable/setting with setq or setq-default.
Last way to configure emacs that I will tell you about is hooks, most cool one of them all. Do you wish the code changed somehow, but do you not want to make the function agin, or need create a container around it? Good news. Simply add a hook, and it will auto-execute whenever the function is triggered. For example, you can do something like:
(add-hook 'find-file-hook '(text-scale-set 2))
This would scale every file, like if you zommed in automatically, every time you use find-file(every time file is opened, or loaded in any way).

Good luck configuring emacs!
See you next time