What are your strengths? You can make your strengths stronger. In my humble opinion the best way to improve your game is to get better at those things you’re already good at doing. You can work on weaknesses too (but that will be a topic for another time). People often don’t think about the things they already do well in terms of improvement. Maybe it’s about not fixing what’s not broken, and there’s some wisdom in that thought. But it’s not so much about repair as it’s about exploration.
The strong skills you have are exactly the ones you need for the learning of new ideas. I feel like the thoughtscape is a New World, it’s an internal geography that’s always available to explore. While many kind viewers have complimented me for the ways I use color (many hearty thanks), I feel like my strongest skill is drawing. I don’t typically draw in a realist way and often that’s a metric used to gauge the quality of drawing. And I’m not knocking that impulse: realism is a good, rigorous metric. However, my drawing superpower is wild carelessness. It’s a skill that was hard won. I am now very good at connecting my visible perception to a line. I will keenly look and draw what I see with little concern whether the drawing provides all the clues needed to identify the object, and instead I let myself seek a percept.
It’s something that Delacroix wrote about in his journals and which I took much to heart.
“Une belle suggestion, un croquis avec une grande sensation, peut être aussi expressif que le produit le plus fini .” A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.
This careless or carefree approach to drawing serves me well, and from it I can even pursue a careful realism for it connects me most keenly to my visual perception.
What are your strengths, and what means can you use to deepen your connection to the skills you already possess? It’s time to toot your own horn in a most felicitous way. It will make your art better. It will make your perception keener. It will make your appreciation of life fuller.
Fantabulous Koi 
I think things done without worrying about the end result always have more life. At least for me they do. But what my strength is, I don’t know. (K)
If you are right, Kerfe, I’ll do well because I’m giving up worry!
What you do is always worth looking at.
Thank you, Kerfe.
Perhaps one of your strengths is having an intuition about when the result possesses that sense of life about it. Even the seemingly unplanned route might be invisibly one of your superpowers, operating so instinctively, so much in the background, that you don’t even notice it. That’s a marvelous strength indeed, Kerfe.
I hope that’s true!