The process of skill acquisition happens in three stages:

First, the cognitive stage.

In this stage, you have to be consciously focused on what you’re doing. You have to think about each step; follow a recipe; or follow instructions. Because you don’t own the knowledge yet, you might feel dumb, like “This is harder to learn than I thought!” or even “I’m just not getting this!”

This stage is almost always done with a teacher or a mentor.

Second, the associative stage.

Now you’ve got the process memorized, even if you’re not really skilled at it. You’re a dedicated student; but you can practice on your own, and you can practice in the real world instead of a controlled classroom. You are aware enough of your own skill that you can self-audit (“Hey, it worked better when I did it like THIS”). This is where deliberate practice comes in: not just reps, but meaningful reps with feedback from yourself or others. One myth, at this stage, is the “10,000 hour rule” - the idea that you must put in 10,000 hours of practice to become a master. It’s not quite true. You must put in thousands of hours of GOOD practice to achieve mastery. That means feedback from yourself and others, not just doing the same thing poorly for 10,000 hours. Without this feedback loop, you will not improve. The more objective the feedback, the more rapidly you can improve. So a mentor can really help in this stage, too - even though it’s painful to continually find flaws in your practice.

Third, the Autonomous stage.

At this stage of skill acquisition, you can perform the skill pretty well. You can do it all day long. You don’t even really have to think about it. And that’s what makes this stage dangerous: your skill can plateau. You can get bored. Nothing is forcing you to improve, and so you might not want to. But real masters of any skill - including entrepreneurial skills - keep looking for ways to get better.