[zanny]

I've picked up drawing in the last few years, probably because it occupies enough overlap with the centers of my brain I trained to code but also is outside the envelope enough to still feel like something different from my day job.

Its basically the same thing there too. Honestly you need both structured learning and lived experience in both, and probably in most skills in life. If you don't have the structure you will meander aimlessly solving "problems" and "getting better" (at code or art) but never actually getting anywhere with it. If you only have the structure you will never be able to actually make anything truly new because you can't solve the novel problems in the trenches.

Start something new with structure but rapidly push yourself to start using that regimented curriculum to make new stuff. And then when you enter a new problem domain (you learned Python and want to start doing networking or you know how to draw but want to paint) you switch back to a regimented curriculum to start till you get that 20% baseline knowledge to build off of again.