Habits / Approaches of Successful Musicians

Becoming a competent, well rounded musician is hard work and truly meritocratic in the sense that if you hear a great musician there is a 100% chance that they have put in thousands of hours of practice in an efficient and focused manner. Part and parcel of that is developing good habits and approaches to all the component parts of playing your instrument.

Here's a list of several such habits and approaches, the more you adhere to these, the more you'll progress and maximize your potential:

• Memorize the fretboard
  
• Always know the name of every chord you're playing
  
• Think in terms of intervals: ex) if you're playing an A note to a D note, think of it as a 4th
  
• When playing chord progressions, think using the roman numeral system (Nashville system) ex) F – Dm = I to vi in key of F
  
• consistently work on developing your ear by singing notes while you play them, figuring out chord progressions, melodies, solos etc., transposing songs, get ear training app to identify intervals and chords
  
• Practice using a metronome/ drum beats often
  
• work on many techniques/aspects of playing: bending, stretching, sliding, hammer-ons, pull-offs, harmonized bends, pre-bending, harmonized leads, arpeggios, chord/melody playing, fingerpicking, pick and finger technique, tapping, pick tapping, harmonics, artificial harmonics, strumming, sweeping, string skipping and right and left hand muting.
  
  

In conclusion, the way to get to the point where you don't always have to be actively calculating everything you're doing, paradoxically is to always (or at least often) be calculating everything you're doing!