My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player.
Having been playing competitively I have noticed ALMOST ALL of people being intent on playing the game well are completely misplacing there focus, effectively wasting their time on stuff that does not matter.
They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes:
- polishing endlessly skills that give diminishing results but are comfortable to the player but avoiding tackling problems that the player is not comfortable with
- repeating the same routine all the time instead of constantly switching up stuff they are training. If you are training well after some time you have trained a skill enough that you should switch to another that now gives best ROI.
- repeating and acting on falsehoods/myths about the game
- complaining about the unfairness of the game which means they would like to play some different game which is governed by their idealized rules instead of trying to understand the real rules of the real game
- not being ruthlessly critical about their abilities which is necessary step to identifying what to work on to progress,
- not being able to spend a moment to consciously reflect on ones progress to identify why it is they are stuck (instead of blaming everybody)
- being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better. Think Starcraft players who find that they can get consistent wins cannon rushing their enemies but are not willing to fail to try other strategies.
etc.
An example would be rookie players on iRacing (I'm nowhere near the top). iRacing requires you to get minimum amount of games but also, more importantly, minimum safety rating to be able to progress from rookies.
Players who are stuck but would want to leave rookies in iRacing are constantly complaining at other players constantly hitting them, effectively ruining their safety raiting.
While it is true that the state of the game in rookies is such that you get hit frequently, there are people who are quickly sailing through rookies. To do that you just need to notice that the critical skill is not hitting other players and avoid getting hit. Instead of focusing on getting to best place, focus on not hitting anything. Yet, so many people do not understand this and are destined to stay in rookies for a long time.