Your question is philosophical. As far as I know, there is no normed linear space of all possible mathematicians on which we have a metric to compare elements in the space!
My personal opinion is that there is an infinite amount of mathematics. If there isn't, then it is extremely large. This means any knowledge you have will be woefully less than what is possible to know. (Put some measure on the infinite set of all possible mathematics?)
Additionally, you will always find a person, either from the past or present, and possibly the future, who knows more mathematics or knows more about some particular branch of mathematics. While it is true that you can make comparisons with other people's mathematical abilities, that is often demoralizing. For most people, anyways, they aren't "at the top".
Of course, there is a threshold I am assuming one is beyond. There is clearly a difference between the majority of calculus students and math PhD students. Here, yes, you should be comparing yourself to see if you can master undergraduate and graduate material to know if you can, say for instance, do research in mathematics.
But all that aside, it is somewhat pointless and self-serving if you do mathematics merely for status. You should enjoy doing it as you should enjoy doing anything difficult. And mathematics is genuinely beautiful. I suggest you are doing well if you continually are surprised at what you learn, if you are able to find satisfaction in meeting non-trivial personal goals, and if you surprise yourself by going beyond your expectations.
In particular, improve your ability to solve problems, improve your ability to propose problems, and improve your ability to explain mathematics.
If you work on a difficult problem and you solve it, then you've surpassed your expectations! Otherwise it would not have been a difficult problem--the doubt of solving it makes it difficult. If you can propose new problems, you can enjoy the excitement of the novelty of new (to you at least) mathematics. If you can visualize the structure of mathematics and express it clearly to others, you can appreciate the beauty of mathematics and in fact share it as well.
In order to do any of this, you do need to know what you don't know. Otherwise you can't envision any improvement. There is some value in making your own personal maps of what the mathematical landscape looks like. This is very much in line with the saying that the wise man knows what he does not know.
That's my 2 cents.
In short: "varieties are nice schemes over fields". In particular, the study of varieties is a subscase of the study of schemes. A variety (depending on who you ask) over a field $k$ is a finite type separated (usually reduced, sometimes geometrically integral!) scheme over $\text{spec}(k)$.
The reason that the two fields look so different, is purely in language. When one studies varieties on their own, it's likely that one is using a source that uses the classical (read "pre-Grothendieck") language. This language suffices to talk about such well-behaved schemes, but fails to distinguish between the more sophisticated properties of general schemes (e.g. a point $\text{spec}(k)$ and a 'fuzzy point' $\text{spec}(k[x]/(x^m))$).
That said, much of general scheme theory actually can be reduced to the study of varieties. This is because, for a sufficiently nice schemes (most that we encounter) we can think about them as being 'fibered' over varieties. By this, I mean that if $X$ is a scheme, with an equipped map of schemes $X\to S$ which satisfies some mild properties, then all of the fibers $X_s$ for $s\in S$ are varieties over $k(s)$. This allows one to think about general schemes as being 'families of varieties indexed by other schemes'.
It is a mistake to confuse 'variety land' with 'commutative algebra land'. What is more likely happening, is that when you are looking at texts on varieties, they happen to be focusing (perhaps at the beginning) on affine varieties. This is why the following correct identification can be confused with the above incorrect one: 'affine scheme land' IS 'commutative algebra land'. This holds true for schemes over arbitrary bases, and is made precise by an (anti)equivalence of categories between affine schemes (over an affine base) and algebras over that affine base.
In terms of learning it, historically varieties came before fields. They are also the most tenable examples of schemes (besides, perhaps, number rings), and so are useful to have in your back pocket. The classical language, what you would most likely learn varieties in, has the advantage of being simpler, and perhaps easier to see the geometry. Unfortunately, it is often times sloppy, and hard to analyze the fine structure results that you'd need.
In this way, I think that a cursory reading of a book on varieties, and almost more helpful a book on complex manifolds, is a helpful first step to studying schemes. That said, there will be no technical loss (only a loss of intuition) by starting directly with schemes.
Good luck, and feel free to ask a follow up question.
Best Answer
It is very important to convince oneself to view the good work others have already done as potentially helping you, not being a burden.
It is observable that the "school-work" model of mathematics mostly presents us with obligations-to-study which are not well explained, apart from the usual threat-of-bad-grade and/or loss of funding. And, indeed, some of the traditional requirements are rather stylized, and have drifted over time, or have fallen out of sync somewhat with contemporary events, so the underlying utility can be obscured. But one should not be deceived by this picture of mathematics presented by "requirements" and such. Some things are very useful "even if they are required". :)
As some consolation, also the very model of "study" presented by school-math is itself considerably caricatured, in my opinion. The idea that one is not allowed to move forward without having done all the exercises and assimilated all the proofs of all the lemmas is needlessly and unhelpfully constrictive. Certainly not helpful in getting any larger perspective. Many of the usual exercises are merely makework, artificial, and not a good investment of time. A more mature and useful notion of "study" is to try to acquire awareness of the general pattern of events, some illuminating examples, and only return to low-level or foundational details when they become "action items", sort of thinking in terms of need-to-know.
That is, imagine there's no final exam, no quizzes, no weekly exercises to be graded, but that one should try be able to answer the "What's the point of this?" questions.
At a further point, if one wants to make genuinely useful contributions, genuinely advancing collective understanding, it is obviously necessary to have some awareness of what that collective understanding is already. Re-inventing things can be fun, and is inevitable, but one wants to do more.
In fact, I would argue that (a mature notion of) "study" is inseparable from (a mature notion of) "research". Or indistinguishable. In the endeavor of trying to improve one's understanding of some phenomena or structures, by looking at what other people have done and trying to organize it in one's mind, often one "accidentally" understands something that perhaps was not already well understood. Bingo: "research".