Cognitive neuroscience has a theory of mind (called predictive processing) that suggests that the human brain is a prediction engine, which consistently creates our perception of the world based on our past interactions within similar environments.
In the beginning, when you are young, there isn’t much information to go off of, so you get mostly unconstrained inputs from the external world into your brain, but as you get older, you start to filter through this variety for usefulness, making better distinctions.
You create mental concepts in your mind about what is important and what is not, and then these concepts shape your future perceptions by using the already-selected knowledge to further select knowledge.
This entire process is mostly intuitive, and what keeps it updating is pain/pleasure, which tells your body that a certain perception and your corresponding reaction should either be reinforced or not. But some forms of experience on the pain/pleasure axis like surprise and awe can be used to intentionally tell your mind that something unexpected was experienced, too, encouraging you to consciously readjust the conceptual model.
Whether you are learning to play a sport or simply trying to create a more accurate mental model of reality in your mind, you are working with a variety of experiences, and within those experiences, you have to choose and reinforce the ones that are the most useful to you.
In this way, everything that you do is essentially an experiment that gets refined and corrected with experience and practice.
The difference between you and, say, a professional tennis player is almost certainly that they have a genome that makes them more suitable to play their sport, but more importantly, they have intuitive knowledge embedded in their brain from all of the predictive processing they have done, in a very specific environment, to refine their sense for what works and what doesn’t.
The same can be said for great artists and scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, and other everyday folks who do what they do well.
Our brain is a prediction engine that builds knowledge and gets smarter as it better aligns what it needs to do with the demands of the environment.