Improving your ability to do a particular kind of work doesn’t always come from doing the work itself. You need separate time to specifically focus on improvement.
When you’re doing the work, especially if you’re doing it because you have to, you often avoid the very behaviors that are most conducive to improving. For example, if your job is carpentry, you’re probably building things for your clients – so you’re not experimenting, taking extra time to try new techniques, and so on. You’re just building what you need to build.
So you might be getting faster and the work might be getting easier, but you’re not breaking new ground. You’re not “leveling up.”
If you want to do that, you need to do more than just the work itself. In fact, you specifically need to step away from the work. You need to spend some time in study and reflection. You need to spend some time just playing. You need to spend some time with other craftspeople. All of these things will improve your talent, even though they aren’t helping you get any work done in the immediate sense.
We can get so caught up in the work that we lose sight of this. When everything is deadlines and hustle we can easily forget about improving and learning. But where’s the fun in that?
The Opportunity Machine 