There's a cool book called 'Mastery' that talks about this stuff and how what we learn is a series of peaks and troughs. If you're learning new techniques, you actually get worse at what you're doing as you are trying to master the new techniques. Then you get them down and assimilate them in to your (in the case flow) you start to see improvement again. I feel like I've practiced a lot and not really got to where I'd like to be in that amount of time. But then again, I don't think im particularly musical or any thing. Having turntables as your first "instrument" kind of sucks as there's not as many pre defined things to practice as other instruments, in my opinion.