Learning a skill, especially a cognitive skill like problem solving or project management, is not the same as learning declarative knowledge (facts, recipes). When you start off in many skill based fields, you learn the fundamentals (rules of chess, keys on a piano, the idea of pedaling to get a bicycle mobilized). Over time you learn what the fundamentals mean, how the fundamentals relate to each other under different situations, how to combine fundamentals, how to interpret results, and so forth. The development of skills resembles a journey, with lots of practice and effort. The term expertise is overused and abused - you can be a relative expert to those around you, best in the room, but that does not necessarily mean you are a true expert!
Ericsson and Pool (2016) is a good read if you are interested in how skill and expertise is developed. Ericsson and Pool describe what is needed to learn a skill in blunt terms. If you have tried to seriously learn any skill (sport, music, etc.), you know that you will not necessarily enjoy the practice, that you need someone to mentor and help you, that you have to slowly and systematically increase the difficulty and challenge level. You might enjoy the recital, the game against a real opponent, solving a real problem, but it is not always fun in between.
Failure - learning to fail, accepting failure, learning from failure, embracing and perhaps even enjoying failing to some degree - is key to learning. You will make mistakes others do not at that level. You have to be comfortable with making mistakes. Getting up. Dusting yourself off. And trying again. Of course, you should avoid making the same mistake repeatedly – figuring out where you went wrong, adjusting, and trying again. Skill development requires this attitude. You will not improve if you receive praise for everything you do and you are told everything is great and that you are wonderful. You need to learn how to hear - it is not good enough, here is what you did wrong, try again. You have to learn not take failing personally. You have to be motivated by it. This is what separates the highly skilled from the average and the ‘good enough’.
Some people can self-regulate and learn by themselves (metacognition - awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes - Oxford Dictionary). Many people need someone who will call it the way it is, who will point out when you are stalled and have plateaued, and when you need to change the way you are trying to do something. You need the discipline to practice and think about your actions - not just go through the motions. You need to be aware of the process and the components that make up the skill.
You might need a long term goal. You can set a level for yourself - perhaps set a target where you become good enough that you would pay someone for the same thing (the outcome, the result) you just learned to pull off, be it a process or specific skill. A short term goal? Better than last time.
In most skills, the experts think differently and do things differently from the novices. You can do research and figure out what the differences might be and then be consciously aware of skill development. Or, you can identify the fundamentals of a skill and consciously work on them first - making sure that you have a solid foundation. If you push too fast, it can be demoralizing and depressing - you need to be realistic about your expectations and how long it will take to proceed from novice to intermediate to senior to consultant and then expert. It commonly takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice where each hour might often have one or more practice sessions to become a true expert. To put this in context, a typical university course is about 150 hours all in and contrast this with playing, reflecting, getting feedback, and consciously trying to improve over 10,000 hours of playing chess or Go, a card game like bridge, or playing a musical instrument. It does not happen overnight. It takes years of deliberate practice of relatively frequent repetitions.
Ericsson, A., and R. Pool (2016). Peak – Secrets from the new science of expertise, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, NY.