Do try and get your jpeg files right in the camera before you get carried away with raw.
That was what we had to do w/ film, but the rules are different w/ digital. It is perhaps still a good exercise to try; go out one day and
seriously try to take every image 100% perfect so that nothing needs to be done later. Take a wide range of subjects: Landscapes, Sports, Street Photography, Portraits, Closeups of Some Products...whatever interests you, This exercise will open your eyes. It's incredibly difficult to do everything 100% perfectly!
Another worthwhile exercise is to do the
opposite. Go out one day as setup your camera to operate w/o any input from you, but shoot RAW. Be sloppy. Just fire away and then go home and use LR to render JPEGs. Don't crop them. Don't do ANY editing.
You will obviously have more pictures from Day 2, so look at them and rate them. It's terribly easy in LR; just pull up an image in the Develop Module and type 0-5 which will assign that number of stars. Then go back and pick out the best N images from Day 2, where N is the number of 100% perfect images from Day 1. The easy way to do that is to assign 5 stars to the keepers from Day 2. This is easy to do when someone shows you how...
[Aside] How to select on Star Ratings...
1. Just above the "filmstrip" at the bottom is a thin black strip. At the extreme right side of this strip is a grey field that starts out saying "Filters Off".
2. Click on that "Filters Off" field. A white window will appear with 12 choices. Click on "Rated".
3. The filmstrip will probably change, but ignore it for the moment. Notice that a line of stars has appeared to the left of the "Rated" field. Click on the right most star and all of them will turn white. You have now selected only the images that you rated "5".
4. Those "5-star" images should be in the filmstrip. Select all of them.
Then go to the Library Module and Export them as JPEGs. This will take only a few minutes!
Then use the Slideshow Module of LR to setup a show of these images. Scramble them; you don't want to have all of Day 1 and then all of Day 2, but you need some way to know which is which! THEN, invite a friend to come over for a "screening". Show the friend the pictures and have s/he rate each one. After you have had perhaps a dozen friends do this, tally their votes. I think you will find that they like the stuff from Day 2 MUCH more than Day 1.
Why? Because it is more fun to take pictures casually and that joy of photography affected what you captured!
Then on Day 3, edit ALL the good 5-star images from Day 2. Your goal should be to make them POP. A good way is to set Clarity = +25 and Vibrance = +18. Then look at the Histogram and use the "Exposure slider to move it close to the right side [if it was not already close]. As a test to see if you have the "Exposure" right, find an image w/ a white object; mouse over that white object. It should be around 95% in all 3 color channels [they are shown below the Histogram when you do this.
Then watch the left side of the histogram and use the "Shadows" slider in much the same way.
Then, go to the "Detail" panel on the right side [all the above was in the "Basic" panel] and expand it. Look for noise in each image and set the NR slider to just barely remove it. Add a bit of sharpening [not usually more than 50].
Enable lens corrections and if needed select the brand and model of your lens.
Now you have some great images. Test them on your friends. Show them the before/after and ask them to select the version they prefer.
