When I think of "valuable lessons" my mind is flooded with a series but I think the most practical place to start is method/process of consumption. For purposes of simplicity I'll just start with the most popular method, smoking/vaporizing. As I think most people should know by now, smoking anything produces carcinogens and isn't ideal. These days there's many tools to vaporize DMT in a way where you can measure each dose and have a simple tool that provides consistent results. Many vaporizers can event set the specific temperature the device gets to which is important for DMT. The molecule is much more heat sensitive than other commonly vaporized things like THC/dabs/flower. The "best temperature" depends on a couple variables but if you set the vape to 160°C (320° F) it's a good place to start. You can always increase the temperature but you don't want to scorch the molecule, the taste is..... I'm a bit old school in my methods, I use a Yocan Evolve XL with 4 quartz rods wrapped in what I hope is titanium. It has a kettle you can load up with a couple hits if you want. Just remember to pull slowly on it or you might take all those hits at once (ask me how I know 🤣). $35 tool, works great as a portable dab rig too if you get a 2nd kettle for dabs. Start here and you'll be wasting less material and it's way easier to share between friends if you're into that sort of thing.