A Glimpse at Excellence
This isn't a chess post exactly, but it does broach a topic I used to write on occasionally: achieving excellence. Many are familiar with the late Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hour rule, which really wasn't Ericsson's but Malcolm Gladwell's popularization and misuse of Ericsson's research. The "rule" states that with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, one can become a world-class performer in any field. This is more an amalgam of (mostly) Gladwell and (a smaller degree of) Ericsson, but it seems to be the way this has entered the popular imagination.
And it's still wrong. One will get very good at the skill they work on, assuming deliberate practice - working in a focused way on areas of challenge and weakness, paying attention to feedback from reality and/or skilled coaches - but that isn't enough to become world-class. What's missing? For one thing, obviously, there's talent. Talent isn't sufficient of itself to become world-class. There's no doubting the talent of Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer, or Garry Kasparov, but there was no one who worked harder than those three in their times. Not even close. But it's also quite clear that very, very, very few people who worked as hard as they did would come within a mile of their accomplishments.
But even when we stick to the training side of the equation, deliberate practice, at least as generally understood, is inadequate. What's missing? Deliberate practice is what one does to achieve a certain standard. It is getting to the level of what's already known, achieving a level of knowledge and skill that represents the baseline of professional competence. For a chessplayer, it would mean, for instance, mastering all the material in Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. But there's more to being great than knowing what everyone else knows.
For example...? Well, here's a great example from basketball, featuring the recent two-time NBA MVP Steph Curry. Compare his training regimen even to that of his fellow NBA players, and you get a glimpse of what differentiates the best from the "merely" elite. In chess, I remember that when Kasparov retired, the amount of opening theory he had on his hard drive was the envy of the chess world, and was so gigantic that even strong players felt "nauseated almost" by the material he had worked out. (And this link dates to 10 years before he retired; the material he had generated by 2005 would have been larger by orders of magnitude.) It was his colossal capacity for work that set him apart from his peers, several of whom were probably as talented as he was from a purely chess perspective, and this kept him as the world's #1 player from 1985 through his retirement in 2005.
So: if you're ambitious, you'll have to do the grunt work, yes; but that's only the first stage. If you're doing what everyone else does, then you'll be like everyone else (assuming roughly equivalent talent). You'll need to find something qualitatively different to reach a new level. I think this is usable advice not only for the Steph Currys and Garry Kasparovs of the world; if it were, then this post would be for a very small readership. I think we can all use this, even if we've plateaued, to outdo our current peer groups.