Getting Better at Getting Better

What expenditures of your time or money are the most efficient at generating improvement in your totality of climbing accomplishments?

• Guidebooks - Buying a book and consistently browsing through it for inspiration and information is an underrated mechanism towards actually getting yourself to the top of something.
• Meaningful partnerships - Climb with ambitious climbers who challenge you. Be reluctant to consistently climb with others who are complacent or who are worse climbers than you.
• Learn your weaknesses - When you team up with a climber who is (broadly) worse than you, find specific ways that he or she is more competent. Learn about their specific strengths.
• Guiding - Find a specific highly-accomplished guide/instructor. Pay them for a day of climbing on a specific route or at a new crag that you feel would otherwise be slightly above your ability to tackle. Ask many many questions. Include the question "How would you be doing this if I were your partner and not a paying student". 
• Classes - Be reluctant to substitute social and political capital for competency in choosing instruction or knowledge sources.
• Advice Skepticism - The person who "achieves the most via the least" likely has far greater insight into achieving goals than does someone who has "achieved the most with the most".