Oscar Wilde once made this observation: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” In other words, the only way to truly learn something is through experience.

When it comes to investing, though, this is easier said than done, because learning through experience can be expensive. That’s why Warren Buffett once quipped that, “It is good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

How can you square this circle? In my view, it doesn’t have to be an either-or decision. Wilde and Buffett each make good points. To learn more about investing, it makes sense, I think, to combine elements of both education and experience. How might you approach that?

Let’s start with education. Finance books and articles could fill a library, but there’s no need to read them all. Instead, I’d focus on this short list to learn four important concepts.

1. History. If there’s one thing about the stock market that’s predictable, it’s the fact that it can be totally unpredictable. New crises come along frequently, and each one is different enough to give investors renewed anxiety. In dealing with these crises, what’s most important? In my opinion, it’s having perspective. Good investors have a sense of market history, and that can help them navigate through crises better than others.

To learn history, the first thing you might do is to consult this list of past market crashes. While it’s useful to study U.S. history, this list is global, going back to the Dutch tulip craze in 1637. Lists like this can help us appreciate an unavoidable reality: that crises have always been a feature of investment markets, and likely always will be. While that fact might be unnerving, this knowledge can help us better weather future events.

The investment consulting firm Callan provides another helpful resource: Its Periodic Table of Investment Returns helps investors appreciate the largely random nature of markets and thus, the futility of making predictions.

For a more comprehensive study of market history, turn to William Bernstein’s The Four Pillars of Investing. One of the four pillars is dedicated to history. As Bernstein puts it, markets periodically go “barking mad.” But by studying history, investors have “at least a fighting chance” of recognizing and understanding the madness when we see it. An updated edition was published just a few years ago.

2. Psychology. Understanding market psychology is, in my view, as important as studying history. Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is a good place to start. In a preface, Warren Buffett notes that he first came across this book 75 years ago: “I thought then that it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is.” Why? Graham explains market psychology by way of a parable.

Mr. Market is a fellow who can’t control his emotions. Sometimes he’s rational, Graham says, but sometimes “his enthusiasm or his fears run away with him.” Mr. Market’s behavior is representative of the market as a whole. That’s why, Graham says, investors “should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances.”

3. Statistics. How should we think about star investors who seem to be able to beat the market? In his book Fooled by Randomness, retired investor Nassim Taleb offers this illustration: “If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them would come out with an exact version of the Iliad.” Taleb acknowledges that the probability is “ridiculously low,” but he uses this idea to explain why we should never be too impressed by investors who manage to beat the market. In short, Taleb ascribes it to random chance. Each year, there will always be investment managers who end up way ahead, but there are very few, Taleb points out, who are able to beat the market multiple years in a row.

Taleb’s book is 20 years old, but newer data continues to confirm his argument. Each year, Standard & Poor’s publishes its “Index vs. Active” report which compares the performance of actively-managed funds to their benchmarks. In any given one-year period, somewhat more than half of active funds underperform. But over longer periods, upwards of 80% or 90% of active funds underperform.

4. Simplicity. Retired money manager Peter Lynch has commented that investing “is both an art and a science” but adds that “too much of either is a dangerous thing.” To see what Lynch means, I recommend the book When Genius Failed. It tells the story of how a group of Nobel Prize winners started a hedge fund based on highly quantitative strategies. It worked for a while, but their pedigree and early successes led to an overconfidence in the system they’d built. The result was a meltdown so severe that the Federal Reserve had to step in to stabilize the situation.

The lesson: Complex investment strategies might seem compelling, but simplicity, in my view, is a more reliable strategy for most investors most of the time. For more on that point, you might like a book titled The Simple Path to Wealth.

Another recommendation: Longtime journalist and investment manager Barry Ritholtz recently published an entertaining volume titled How Not to Invest. The book covers what he calls bad ideas, bad numbers and bad behavior. In his career in finance, Ritholtz has seen it all. This book is a field guide to avoiding the worst of these potholes and keeping things simple.

What about Oscar Wilde’s comment that we need to learn through experience? There’s truth to it. So in addition to this recommended reading, I suggest that investors—especially those just getting started—experiment a little. What should you buy? To answer this question, we can look to Albert Einstein.

At one point in his life, Einstein owned a small sailboat which he named Tinef—German for “piece of junk.” Because it wasn’t very seaworthy, he often ended up on the rocks. But Einstein continued sailing the Tinef, even refusing a motor that a friend had bought for him. Einstein preferred wandering and exploring, even if it didn’t always end well.

If you want to learn more about investing than you can learn by reading, I suggest taking a page from Einstein’s book. Explore a bit. If you have a favorite product, try buying the company’s stock. Interested in cryptocurrency? You could put a few dollars into one of the new bitcoin ETFs. In short, you might explore some of the investments that—according to the data—aren’t necessarily recommended. As long as the amounts are modest, I do see this as an effective way to learn.​