Related: The Valley of Bad X. Learning new skills is especially hard in domains in which your first few attempts are likely to fall far short of your mental picture of improvement or even make you worse initially. I find it helps to explicitly visualize people who I perceive as being skilled in X failing at it over and over again when they were first learning. Rather than think of myself as wanting to affiliate with the end result I think of myself as wanting to affiliate with the process.

Also related: Punctuated equilibrium skill growth vs linear skill growth (ht Ethan Dickinson). You will be especially discouraged if you are expecting linear growth and instead get lumpy growth.