People who cook well were not taught something the rest of us missed. They have simply cooked more times, paid a small amount of attention while doing it, and repeated the same things often enough to stop thinking about them. That is the entire mechanism, and it works whether or not you are interested in cooking.
Repetition beats variety
Cooking the same dish twenty times teaches more than twenty different dishes cooked once. The second version is better than the first, the fifth is better than the second, and by the tenth you are adjusting rather than following. Novelty feels like progress and rarely is. A small repertoire, cooked often, is what actually turns into skill — see the piece on five dishes worth knowing by heart.
Taste while you cook, not at the table
The single habit that separates people who cook well from people who follow recipes is tasting at every stage and adjusting. It is not a talent; it is a loop of feedback that most home cooks never close. Taste the onions, taste the sauce, taste the water the pasta is in. Each of those is a piece of information you can still act on.
Pay attention to one thing at a time
Notice how the pan sounds when it is hot enough. Notice when the onions change colour. Notice what the dish needed when it was flat. One observation per meal, held for a moment, is enough — and after a year that is three hundred observations. Nothing needs to be written down and nothing needs to be studied. The attention is the whole of it.
Cook when it does not matter
Pressure is the enemy of learning. A weeknight dinner for yourself is where you can safely get things wrong; a dinner for eight people is not. Almost everyone does this backwards and only cooks seriously when it matters. The unglamorous meals, the ones nobody sees, are the ones that make you competent. Occasions simply show what you already have.
Accept that some of it will be bad
Everyone who cooks produces dull food regularly. The difference is that experienced cooks know why it was dull and are not surprised by it. A flat dinner is information: it was under-salted, or lacked acid, or the pan was not hot. That is the loop closing. It is also why the fastest improvement comes from cooking more often rather than more carefully.
Cook the same things repeatedly, taste as you go, notice one thing each time, and do it on nights that do not matter. Skill turns up quietly, and one day you realise you have stopped reading the recipe.