The main advantage of having no readership is that I have very few restrictions on what to write about.
(the main disadvantage is obvious)

So in this post, I would like to tell a short zen story -

Notice the excessive and redundant outlining (very blunt around the eyes), and that nothing is just quite right. I would be embarassed to display this in public, but everyones first steps were (or still are) awkward.

Art
On my first drawing lesson (sketching, to be precise) my teacher gave me the task of copying a grayscaled painting with coal (coal is easy to erase and is good for beginners). The painting featured the face of a girl. As most people would, I started by outlining her face and hair, positioning her nose, shaping her eyes, and went on to coloring the paper to match the tones on the painting. I already spent a hour and a half working on the drawing yet naturally it was disfigured. The teacher did not seem to care much about this. Instead he remarked that in the painting the eyes are not outlined, nor is the face. He also remarked about the incorrect differences in tones. Then he said "this drawing is stuck", took a small cloth and smeared the drawing, erasing most details and leaving only the general shape and tone. An hour and a half of work was ruined, and I was in shock. But I kept an open-mind and listened to his instructions. Here they are, partly in my own words and commentary, but in the same spirit:
1. Avoid detail. Anything you can't see when reducing your eyes is not important
2. Your sight is biased. To be correct you have to compare elements to other elements (elements being location, size, color, etc.).
3. Observe. Spending time on understanding the drawing (the relationships of elements) will save you time when drawing.
He said this before but it only made sense at that point. And so I resumed drawing, trying to keep these rules. I was amazed by two things: How quickly I managed to reconstruct the painting, and how convincing it looked without any real detail. And so, I learned several things:
1. Your internal model is harder to construct than the drawing. Spend more time on observing, and you will spend less time on the drawing.
2. Detail distracts you from the more important problems.
3. Keep detail to the end. If you start from it, you will never get it right.

Programming
If you remember the title, you must ask yourself what all this has to do with programming. Well, as I returned home from the lesson I had some time to contemplate and I remembered a time when a friend and I had to teach someone how to program. This was at work, so that someone was committed. Among the teachings we conjured up an exercise which was supposed to bring the "student" to the right spirit. The right spirit, or as we called it, the "programming zen", was very important to us. The exercise was this: The student was given a programming problem which he had to solve. After making sure that he completes the program correctly and that the code is of high quality, we order him to erase the program (and any copy) from his computer.
This seemingly cruel exercise was meant to give the following lesson: Code is not important. What's important is your knowledge and your understanding of it. Once you solve a problem once, you can solve it again without an effort.

Zen
This was what I remembered, and I then realized that I have been taught what I tried to teach someone else some time ago, and it applies to both drawing and programming:

Your internal model is harder to construct than the output, and is also more important. Spend more time understanding the problem, and you will spend less time on implementing it.

I believe the other tips and learnings mentioned here also apply to programming, but these are stories for another time.