Hello everyone,
I’m curious to know what helped you improve the fastest in Blender — tutorials, daily practice, challenges, or personal projects?
I’d love to hear your experiences and learn from the community.
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Practice - measured in days, weeks, and months.
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Well, I’m not sure, I think everything helps and just like in any practice you have periods when you progress a lot , sometimes you don’t make progress for a long time, but it’s part of the learning experience.
I’m curious about your experience ? how long have you been doing blender, and what was the most helpful to you ?
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Definitely jobs. Practice comes second
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This is not gonna be applicable to vast majority of people, at least outwardly, but: Answering questions on community forums—be it Reddit or on here, but in my case, especially on BlenderStackExchange.
You might think answering questions imply you already know something and you’re just imparting that knowledge to the asker, but that’s really not necessarily the case. I used to only watch tutorials, and that’s good, but after a while I realized whenever I had to apply what I had ‘learned’ in some tutorial back whenever I had watched it, I had already forgotten it in the meantime. This part of the problem is pretty much universal, I would assume: to really learn, you have to do it yourself, not just watch. Encountering problems and spending time trying to solve them is what teaches you in the end.
I acknowledged that after a while, but my issue was, since I couldn’t use Blender much for my day job (Blender is just not very good for architecture), I didn’t even know what problem I could encounter and try to solve. Then one day I thought, “Well, why not try to figure other people’s problems then?”. So I started following Blender Stack Exchange questions to see if any of them piqued my interest. When I found a question I would like the answer to, I would start googling and clicking around in Blender to figure it out, then when I (hopefully) did, I tried writing up a comprehensive answer—with gifs, videos, diagrams, really explaining how I solved it. I did that quite a while and that’s what’s pretty much taught me Geometry Nodes. I would say among the questions I have answered there, majority of them I had no idea how to answer when I had first saw them—though you wouldn’t know it if you just read the answers. Sometimes when I forget how to do something, I go there and look it from my own answer, thanking myself for the helpful screenshot lol. Mind you, it’s not like I’ve become a master, I’m no higgsas or Cartesian Caramel or something, but whatever I know, I learned trying to help other people.
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And Years 
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You are looking at one of the very best learning resources that is out there on the Internet. 
Here, you can ask an answerable question, and get a useful answer very quickly. And, when you think that you can provide an answer or an insight, it’s very easy to do so.
But, learning this stuff is like learning to ride a bike. You’re going to 
some of the time, and that just comes with the territory. Especially with something that is at the moment unfamiliar. Blender is actually a vast product, with lots of nooks and crannies. But, the very good news is, someone else on LQ has already been there, and feels your pain. So, you need to both “seriously attempt to do something,” knowing that you’ll bang your head, and, “know when to ask for help.” (You have already found “where” to ask …)
As the various “stickies” already emphasize, you need to craft an answerable question. This includes: “details details details.”
Every now and then, I’ve run into a head-banger, figured it out for myself, and then promptly wrote about the experience in detail here, while it was still fresh in my mind. LQ has a very good “search” feature, and a useful taxonomy of subforums to limit where you need to look.
(Note: Be aware of when a thread was started, or a reply was added. Blender changes quickly. Older posts offering a solution might no longer apply today. Typically, “Blender is now much better than it was.”)
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Reading the manual.
I think it is safe to say that you can shave months and years off your learning curve by rolling up your sleeves and learning the basics of how the program works.
Balanced of course with some practice and hopefully some experience.
But take the time in the beginning to swallow this bitter, distasteful and unpopular pill.
Within a few weeks to months you can be at rather expert level.
Now skill…
No brainer. That takes a lot of years.
But just don’t stunt your growth by diving in blindingly!
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Yes, I found I learn far better if I have to figure out something in order to get paid. Otherwise the motivations is quite a bit less.
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For me it has less to do with motivation. It is more to do with the practicality that, if I have steady work, doing the same kind of thing over and over again it starts to become second nature.
So yes. You could say motivation.
But even to get to the point that you have work, you have to self-generate the work etchic.
It is a cart before the horse to say get work to be motivated.
If you are not motivated first, and spend hours pouring over the manual/tutorials etc. and practice, you will never find work doing that thing.
It is inevitable that the first work you do will be free. Its either volonteer work or work for your portfolio that never sees the light of day otherwise.
I was and I am able to work with blender in my workplace
First I tried to make simple 3d visualization instead of 2d, it turned out well and next step was to make the same thing much crazier, it helped a lot so for me: 20% work project, 80% personal fun.
I’m still afraid to take on paid, extra work. I think I could handle it, but at the same time I’m not sure.To hell with you, self-criticism…
I miss printed manuals. I used to just sit down and read them end to end and that was a great start.
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Well… you can print or let someone print, and bind a book for every new version of blender…
some people like those e-ink tablets… because the are more pleasant to read than “tablets” and the battery/accu does works for several days… and you can do “remarks” (and even take them to the next version ??).
I would also like to try them but i’m unsure about the size and also do not want to do everthing “via the cloud”… and i do not have enough money to just buy any of them to find out: maybe bigger/smaller, direct accessibale via USB/ Bluetooth or whatever…
…and there are still printed book about blender…
All good ideas. I actually need it far more for Ansys, my engineering software at work so I might try to print it out and see how it goes. Unfortunately their documentation is not great. Blender is far better which should embarrass them into doing better but it hasn’t.
Software agnostic:
Practice (daily basis) - is one of the most effective thing if done right. I.e. you dont practice something just because you like it, you practice something which will challenge you. Not big challenges which will break you, but small steps each time.
Payed jobs - because its always “sharpen” your feel of time and you can more clearly see where you lack of expirience, which took longer time and you can reshape your daily practice and narrowed it into most weak areas, find most effective techniques/workflows/scripts/addons.
Blender specific:
I was throw away all “blender way” things which was possible, starting from keymap, “GRS”, and end at ideology.
No facerolling on a keyboard to achieve simple goal which is literally 1 button in other softwares - but always attempts to find addon which will do it in a normal way as other softwares do.
Extensive use of customized pie-menus which is one of the most effective way to speed-up workflow in any software.
Well… there is a lot of “profesional” software where the documention is not more then sentences like:
With the open file dailog you can open files…
…not even telling you that this is "reachable in the File-menu via File → Open… or talking about some other XY-dialog but not how you reach it… 
But then “the manual” of a car also does not tell you how to drive 
Then again: the manual of blender is also “open source” and anyone can participate to make it better .
Also: often “electronical” manuals with links to other regions are also very handy… even better when you can make comments which are immigratable to the next version (which are in fact very few).