elfs | Drawing on the Scientific Method (Reply)

One of the blogs I've been reading reliably recently, ever since it emerged, is The Scientific Artist. Like many just-started blogs the lifespan of this could be as brief as a mayfly or it may last for months and years, but what the author has been saying for the first couple of entries has made sense to me, so I've been following along and trying to understand what he's saying.

Until today. Today's entry, his ninth, stopped me. The first paragraph reads:

Some thoughts about drawing exercises: in my opinion the best ones are those which you devise for yourself, or adapt from existing ones, or even follow verbatim, with no changes, IF you first see precisely the reason to do them. If you do them from understanding, that sort of exercise will have the most meaning to you, and hence the best results. However, if you do an exercise "by rote", as an unthinking follower, as if repeating a magic saying that will automatically generate a result, then... there probably will be little obvious result.

To me, this is the baffling massive wall that separates me from illustration. Because, as an absolute beginner, I have no idea where to begin. I don't know what exercises will help me improve-- I just know that the doodles I'm doing now aren't working. They aren't communicating to me anything about the scene, setting, or characters that I can barely recognize when I'm done.