The thing that benefited your playing the most

Attending drum clinics. Watching a pro drummer throw down just a few feet away did more for my playing than taking lessons did.

I was fortunate to see these players in various clinics over the years: Dave Weckl, Steve Smith, Chad Wackerman, Peter Erskine, Terry Bozzio, Gregg Bissonette, Rod Morgenstein, Glen Sobel, and even Ginger Baker.
 
Recording. When I was a kid and first starting out my original band hit the point that we wanted to go to a small local studio and record a few songs. We had about 5 or so songs that we were playing for a year or two, we had regular gigs we felt really good about and our friends always told us how great we were. We went into the studio and recorded these songs as a live group take, we walked into the control room super excited only to listen back in horror. We were out of tune, off time, and just generally bad. It's a difficult but important lesson.
 
I haven't found it yet. Not trying to be dismissive but I'm not actually sure I really know at this point. Well? maybe it's that I listened to things over and over and over again...Bonham..Paice to the point of being insane about it and even that in hind sight did me no good really.
 
Consistent visits and open mind at a local jam night. Even when I don't have a gig during a given week, I still get to knock off the performance dust, do some practice playing with others and listening, as well as learning new stuff and genres I don't usually play or listen to.
 
Really paying attention to playing time, no matter the style and pattern. Getting right inside it and playing behind, on and in front of the click and recording what I was doing to see how it sounded.

I have a thing I ended up calling the reality gap and that's the difference between what you hear in your head against what's actually happening. Recording my practice sessions really allowed me to eliminate this issue.
 
The Covid shutdown.

During that time the only live playing opportunity I had was church (live streaming). A year of predominantly rock ballads at 70-80 bpm greatly helped overcome my tendency to rush fills.
 
Focusing on creativity and managing subdivisions in fills have greatly improved my playing over the last couple of years, I think. I used to be very repetitive in that area, at least it would be something I got annoyed by, listening to own recordings. It might not be the single most important thing to make or break a good drummer, but it definitely adds something extra to your playing. Maybe not in pop music though, but that's not mainly were I'm at.
 
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