How to do hard things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Breaking down problems is obvious and known advice, but very helpful, especially when you are lost in the weeds, can't see the forest for the trees, etc. Having it as "a system" helps self-management. Disagree about the importance of touch-typing.

Grammar snark (for an article about writing): "Sometimes it will be obvious what you need to improve, sometimes it won’t. When it doesn’t, ..."

when it doesn't obvious to you

* When creating great work as an expert, you will be working down the ladder of abstraction (e.g. for writing–coming up with a concise high-level vision and then progressively expanding it down to the level of characters on a page)–this is the most efficient way to make anything, since you can sanity check your work at higher levels to avoid expensive rewrites at lower levels. However, when learning, you should learn subskills in the exact inverse order (start from the lowest level–how to type keys–then work upwards). Mastering subskills in this order maximizes the feedback signal you get while learning–if you can't write a paragraph coherently, it is very difficult to determine how well you're doing at developing your authorial voice (or whatever).

* Time spent practicing a skill only makes you faster / more robust at the method you already know; it doesn't lead you to improve your methods. So spend half your time actually performing the skill, and half the time analyzing your work / comparing to known good examples / planning how to improve (and, really, half of that time should be for improving your tools for analysis and comparison...). If you fail to do this kind of meta-work, 10000 hours of practice or whatever will just get you a fast, robust system for producing garbage.

* Assuming you're following an intelligent process for learning the skill (see previous points), the most likely way in which you will fail to learn it is by getting disinterested or discouraged and giving up. It's essential that you try and structure your learning process in a way that yields intermediate feedback and some satisfaction for improvement, and pay attention to both 1) reducing the parts of the process you dislike and 2) figuring out ways to make it enjoyable (including figuring out how successful other people have managed to derive enjoyment from the activity).

Depending on your time constraints, the tips given here seem to apply particularly well: find proxy problems that allows you to learn without as much hardship would be a good idea, as well as the other strategies of breaking it down, etc.

Sometimes time is not on your side though, and you have to get it right without time to practice on proxy problems (at least I believe this can occur).

Then you can use what I call it the 'Kitchen sink' approach: grab a bunch of tools, a bunch of approaches and start digesting your problem through as many viewpoints as possible. If your problem has safety implications and you can verify it, then well enough. Otherwise you make an attempt if you are sufficiently confident in your solution; and take some kind of NOP otherwise (if a guaranteed 0-return NOP even exists).

Also, if you're solving something while time constrained, you may need to reflect afterwards if you could have either prevented the time constraint or prepared better somehow.

In general though, there's hope in the sense that if something is verifiable or approximately-verifiable you can approach good solutions with time. At least I have high hopes of always finding a solution given enough time (i.e. "You're not good enough" does not exist).

That's only not applicable if your time is finite or in the same vein you need to improve a skill to apply a series of finite-time decisions. Eh who cares about finite time anyway? :P

(Yes, in reality everything is limited but there are plenty of tasks you can take your time with...)