Grow Your Comfort Zone

This is quite a general philosophy to learning and doing things. In many ways it is the antithesis of pushing yourself hard. The general idea is this:

1. First make something doable;
2. Then make it easy;
3. Then make it effortless.

When it comes to creative flow, you want as little to get in the way of it as possible. That means making as much as possible instinctive, effortless, and automatic. A professional pianist doesn't need to think about scales, chords, and keys: his brain and body just know them. A beginning pianist who hasn't drilled chords and scales needs to think about them. Thinking about them soaks up precious mental resources, and distracts from other things.

So:

1. If you don't know something, find out. If you can't find out, leave it till later.
2. For those things you do find out, make detailed notes so that in order to do them in future, you only need to look them up in your notes, not research them all over again (e.g. by googling for a site you found two months ago that is no longer there).
3. Those things you do know, repeat, using your notes if necessary, until you can do them reliably without using your notes. Perhaps make more terse notes. With time and practice, what is at first doable becomes easier and easier.
4. With more practice, what becomes easy becomes instinctive, intuitive, and effortless. Once effortless, you can apply such things without them distracting from your creative workflow.

Now you can't apply this idea to everything, but it's a good sketch of a practical philosophy. The idea is that the space of things you can do comfortably will grow over time, like growing a tree or a cultivating a garden, it becomes steadily larger over time, more detailed, more refined. You can plant new ideas, techniques, and such, and cultivate them. Obviously this is not for those who insist on quick fixes and being able to do things straight away. Rather it is for those who are content to take the time to properly learn things. Those who do not are effectively constrained by what they can do without learning.