I’ve set out to work consistently on alternate picking for 100 days, mostly because I’d seen a lot of lessons online of people saying how, really the only thing holding you back from playing like this is dedicating the time to work on it. So time and effort. There is a bit more introspection that is required for you to figure out how you can improve and focus more while you play, but overall most of us are not the players we’d like to be because we, for one reason or another, haven’t worked hard enough. I wager that it will take me more than 100 days to play at around 200 bpm consistently, but it might not…it could take 200 days or 300 days. What I know for sure is that it won’t take a lifetime unless I give up today and revisit it two years from now, and then only work for a month or two at it and give up and revisit it five years later. And the good news is that once I’ve put in the work it should be a technique that I’m able to keep and I then move on to something else.
For all my students, I’d recommend beginning to work on something like this as early as possible so you can move on to more musical things with a great deal of confidence and in the long run you’ll probably find yourself in better musical opportunities earlier in your career.