Steps to mastery : The learning process and the brain

Our brain is very economical in its functioning, once it learns how to do a task, it switches to autopilot mode where the expenditure of energy is minimal.
There is no creation of new neural pathways when our brain became comfortable with a certain skill or task.
When that stage is reached, it is time to introduce new challenging activities and alternate between different learning methods to keep our brain engaged.
On autopilot, the brain gives us an opportunity to expand our knowledge since it frees our conscious which can be able to take on new tasks.

Past the initial steps where everything is new, progress becomes slow, almost unnoticeable. It takes longer for tasks to become inconscious. 

That is the reason why different contraption are gathering dust in our storage rooms, why we drop learning languages after a couple of months, and why we stop painting soon after we start, blaming our "non-artistic" genes.
We need to be retrained to be patient, to be enthusiastic about the journey rather than the results, to do and not to expect.

When we don't know that we don't know we are in the  unconscious incompetence stage, when we are conscious of our incompetence, we are in the conscious incompetence stage, when we start learnig a skill, we are in the conscious competence stage, when the skill becomes an unconscious process, we have reached the unconscious competence stage, which is equivalent to mastery.