I think that's excellent advice from the guys there. It is a matter of practice, practice and lots of lovely practice and eventually things will start to click, then improve a little each time.

I don't think you need to complete every tutorial on earth - they are really there to teach you techniques which you can then put into your own project. Every time I do a tutorial I then try a model of my own using the things I learnt. I am no Maya genius but it seems to work well enough. The difference between people that can simply duplicate and people that create is vast - I wouldn't say the best Maya artists are those that can simply follow a tut, instead I think they are the ones that can create innovative works of their own from basic techniques.

I don't have huge amounts of time to invest in learning Maya so I base my development round the challenges on this site. Each one presents something new, in a fairly compact package, which you can then target research and learning against. This month is animation so it's a good time to look at all that animation stuff etc. Last month was game models so I went and researched how to do low poly modelling etc etc. Even if you don't have time to complete a challenge it offers a focus for modelling, whatever standard you are and everyone is always helpful with crits and suggestions.

Time and resources are different issues in my view however - learning Maya takes time, not necessarily huge amounts of cash if you spend it wisely.

If you have absolutely no time to invest then you won't learn anything, it's like anything else, whether you want this to be a hobby or a profession (I don't advise you to confess to being a hobbyist if you are as people simply won't take you seriously after you do) you have to spend time learning stuff. If there are shortcuts to being a Maya genius noone is sharing them with me!

If you want to learn things invest some of your free time in doing it - most people here have busy lives and choose to spend some of their time working in Maya, it's choices - I could be asleep now instead of writing this and forgetting to save my painting weights before closing my working file (curse moment).

It's like any learning; if this were easy everyone would be making Half Life 3 and producing Pixar quality movies in their time off having learnt Maya in 2 weeks.

If I was you I'd follow Mr Brown's advice, pick something and go at it in the time you have. Little bits of progress in the small time you have is better than spending it wondering why you haven't learnt anything yet 8). And have a look at the challenges too - from next month they are going to be spread over 2 months which will give more time for things; I think you would be surprised what you learn from those - I know I have been.