How to Move the Needle: Moving Past “Mediocre”

A friend recently reached out to me with a goal for this decade: he wanted to stop being “mediocre” at guitar, piano, drums, and singing. He’d been muddling along, but wasn’t seeing the results he wanted.

I’d written out a longer, more generic reply, but I paused to ask him what he actually wanted to be able to do. Once we cleared the air on that, I sent him this advice. If you’re looking to improve meaningfully on an instrument, it comes down to three things:

Manageable objectives
Time budget to achieve those objectives
Purposeful deliberate practice

1) Manageable objectives

Firstly, you’ll likely fail if you try to get better at all four things at once. I’d suggest focusing on just one or at most two. For example: singing and guitar, or singing and piano.

By pairing them, you can “kill two birds with one stone” when practicing. You can interleave working on both simultaneously, and getting a song to a good standard gives you a “finished product” you can put in your back pocket and always pull out.

A note on environment

In our chat, my friend mentioned his keyboard was “so rubbish it’s not inviting to play.” That matters. A real piano in the center of a home naturally invites practice—it’s immersive. If your digital setup is uninspiring, you won’t use it. I told him: stick to the acoustic guitar. Keep it out on a stand so you’ve got no excuse not to pick it up.

2) Time budget

People think they need TONNES of time, or deeply scheduled blocks. That can be helpful, but it isn’t as critical as people think.

Learning to take advantage of 10–15 minute “bite-size” chunks of time to practice is far more helpful. It’s less punishing mentally than setting a goal of “hours” and then failing to meet it. Even 2–5 minutes can be helpful if deployed well. Focused, intentional, deliberate practice is more important than volume.

3) Purposeful Practice Time

You need some kind of overriding system for what you want to achieve with each practice. That could be self-directed, a teacher, or a course—but you have to find a system that helps you move forward.

For guitar, I’ve always been self-taught, but that doesn’t come naturally to everyone. In the absence of a teacher, written books and online systems like Justin Sandercoe are great. Personally, I’ve never found a piano method that connected with me; a lot of teachers lean too heavily on old classical rote methodology that doesn’t actually help you play the stuff you WANT to play.

Final Thoughts: The Repertoire Approach

I’d say focus on songs you want to be able to play rather than technique for the sake of technique.

Start with a list of 5–10 songs and use them to structure your practice.
The 80/20 Rule: You’ll find all 5–10 songs “mosey along” until you hit a wall. When you encounter a struggle, identify exactly what it is and search for a specific solution (like a YouTube breakdown) to bridge that gap.

Building the Toolkit

You’ll conquer 80% of each song, but encounter new challenges in the remaining 20%. Deploy that “problem-solving” approach, and you’ll start to build a repertoire and the technique to support it.

Eventually, your memory will be jogged by songs that function similarly, and you can start exploring those. That’s how you stop muddling along and start actually playing.

Work With Mark

How to improve at music: Moving Past “Mediocre”