[jdietrich]

You can't expect to read art books and study the grand masters and one day magically be able to paint. You start with crayons in kindergarten and work your way up to oil on canvas.

What you need to do is write code. Lots of code. Lots of badly broken, half-functional code. The software equivalent of a child's doodles. After six months you'll be writing code that kinda works some of the time, after two years you'll be a reasonably competent developer, after a decade you'll be an expert. But for any of that to happen, first you have to write a whole lot of bad code.

[Spock]

That's just it! I understand that solution perfectly, it just doesn't seem to sink in/work for me. I've been doing 10 years worth of basics and still can't progress.