I taught myself to use AI tools over six months and the thing that actually helped was not what I expected

About six months ago I decided to get serious about understanding and using AI tools. I tried courses, YouTube tutorials, books, Reddit threads. Some of it helped. A lot of it did not.

The thing that actually moved the needle for me was not any structured resource. It was committing to using an AI tool for every task where it might possibly be useful for thirty days, even when it felt forced, even when the output was not great, even when it would have been faster to just do it myself. The repetition built an intuition for what these tools are actually good at that no amount of watching videos gave me.

I share this not as a universal prescription but because I wasted a lot of time looking for the perfect course before I found the thing that worked. What was the turning point for other people who now feel genuinely capable with AI tools? I am curious whether the pattern is similar or whether people got there very differently.