Craftsmanship and Group Chats

Have met crafters from all walks of life. The generous, the simple, the incredibly pig-headed and the wise are all there sharing and posting and venting... sometimes it's hard to stay on the high road, but you do as you do.

Been asking for feedback and insights on fairs, vendor booth displays, shop policies and so on. These days, I'm most interested in upping my game, so I asked this:

I started to grow aware of this after A critiqued my work and identified some flaws. She told me that people are paying honest money for this (人地用真金白銀買的), so we have to offer top quality goods. And then she gave me all these technical pointers for improving the covers. It made a great difference...

So fast forward a year or so and three craft shows later, I still return to the subject of improving my craftsmanship from time to time. What do skilled professionals do to reach such a level?

The one respondent on Facebook so far said she watched YouTube tutorials and the rest was practice. I do the same... but I also see the importance of experimenting and conducting market research, which for me involves checking out commercially-available notebooks and how they're printed and presented :-) 

The quest continues.