When you start out, you need to learn to play clean, full sounding notes, and you need to learn to keep perfect time--you also need to play chord changes and single note passages in smooth, continuous movements without fudges at the beginning and end of phrases, and you need to be able do it without mistakes.

You need a good instructor to show you how to do this stuff, because you generally can't figure the technique out yourself--more important, you have to develop "Musician's discipline" which, simply, is to start at the beginning and work it through to the end, staying with it until each part is done properly. A big mistake beginners make tends to be thinking that they've got something down when they don't--