I probably played to that one. I seek out any soap operas based on night clubs or musician careers.
Stop asking, and start playing! Why are you reading this instead of playing? (You might well ask, why am I writing this when I could be playing? Well, because it's another enjoyable pursuit... music is not the only thing I enjoy doing....) (You get better quicker, but ideally you stop caring about getting better.)
I'm 100% with Wayne Alexander and Redblur.
I was never interested in "getting good", for its own sake. I'm still not. I just wanted to be able to play the songs I wanted to play. So I sat down and learned them. if they were too difficult, I stopped and moved on to the next tune.
I was lucky to be playing in a band from 9-10 months after I first picked up a guitar. They weren't great (apart from one of them), but they were better than me. There was no competition, or one-up-manship - or anything like "teaching" involved - we were all just having fun playing music we liked.
I.e., the fact they were better than me didn't inspire me to improve - "getting better" was never the point, because nobody ever said (or implied) I wasn't "good enough". Obviously I occasionally encountered things I couldn't play, but it only took a little practice to be able to play them. It was never difficult. (I don't mean I was "talented" - I certainly wasn't! But the music we were playing was the simplest music there is: folk and blues, the occasional easy pop or jazz tune. We played fun stuff, not difficult stuff.)
Aside from that band (where I was either playing bass or strumming guitar), I started teaching myself fingerstyle, because I got obsessed with that sound. I got "good" at that simply through hours working on tunes with the help of a 2-speed tape deck. No tab, no sheet music, no lessons. These tunes were technically way more complicated than the songs the band was playing. But I did it through sheer persistence: note by note, bar by bar... I never thought of it as "hard" or "difficult", and I never planned any "practice schedules" or any idiotic nonsense like that. I was enjoying the whole process, however long it took.
I mean it. If you have to plan a "practice schedule" in order to actually get things done, you need to ask yourself if music is what you really want to do. Maybe you just enjoy planning, schedules and admin for their own sake? That's fine! But nobody got "good" by treating practice like a chore. Nobody got good by forcing themselves to practice when they didn't feel like it. I doubt even whether anybody got good by asking for advice on how to get good!
If you give a kid a toy to play with, do they have to plan a schedule in order to play with it? No, either they play with it or they don't. They play as long as they enjoy it, and stop when they get either bored or too tired.
You just have to want to do it. If you want to play, you play. If you don't, you don't. You do it for as long as you enjoy it, then you stop. At the end of each playing session, you will be a little better than before - but that's not why you do it. "Getting better" is the last thing on your mind (literally, because you might well notice, with hindsight, that you can now play something you couldn't before). If you don't practice for days on end, that's fine, because there are other things you want to do, so you do those instead. You play again as soon as you want to. Whether that's 5 minutes after the last time, or 5 days, or 5 weeks.
Obviously the less you play, the less you improve. But why is that a problem? Who cares, if you don't care? If you don't like playing, why is it a problem if you're not playing? The whole point of music - for you and for anyone listening to you - is a unique experience in the present moment. You are fully engaged in what you are doing. Nothing else is on your mind aside from what you are playing. That's the reason you do it, to enter that zone. How "good" you are is beside the point.
Notice I'm using the word "play" instead of "practice". That's important. The word "practice" comes with all kinds of irrelevant baggage. It suggests there is a purpose to it beyond the activity in the moment. That's the wrong way to think. The more you think about the future goal of the activity ("getting better") the less effective the activity is! It will still be effective to some degree, of course. But the less engaged you are (below 100%), the sooner you will get bored with it, or experience it as a chore - meaning you will learn less (if indeed you learn anything at all).
In short, ironically, the way to actually get better is to stop thinking about getting better.
