[ryanmolden]

This. It amazes me the number of people that think "I work 8 hours a day (on average), so I should be world class in about 3.4 years". As you said it is concentrated, skill-adjusted practice, NOT just doing something over and over. The biggest problem is that you generally need an expert coach/mentor to put this work together for you, since you likely would not be a good judge of what would appropriately challenge you at your current skill level. Most people swing to the tails of the distribution in their self-made challenges, either too easy or too hard, you want the Goldilocks zone. I unfortunately have no wisdom for or solution to this problem, it is one of scale (i.e. there are more people that want said expert mentorship than there are expert mentors to give it) and time.