"do you study?" and answer that they do puzzles and look at master games regularly. However, all of these players pretty much sit within a 100-point rating range that they vary within, but do not get better.
I talked with a guy who is a professional stock trader once. I asked him how long it would take him to teach me a little bit so I could trade stocks part time and make a little extra money. I told him that I am a total nerd and really get into these things, and would spend almost all of my free time learning whatever I needed to learn. He found my interest amusing, but said it wouldn't work out. He said unless I was willing to quit my job and come work for him for 10 years, I had no chance of learning how to trade stocks. Unless it's your day job, the thing that you spend the most time on every single day, the thing that you struggle with all day long, you can't be great at it.
Most people do not have any idea of the amount of work required to improve and be a top performer in a competitve endeavor. Doing tactics problems for 30 minutes per day and expecting to see real results is pie in the sky stuff for people with their head in the clouds. It's not how the real world works. There are plenty of fields filled with lazy people where hard workers can pick the low hanging fruit. Chess is not one of those fields. I don't know exactly what the number is, but I would guess it's around 3 hours. If you can't spend 3 hours per day consistently, I think making consistent progress will be very difficult, and even at 3 hours per day, progress will be slow.
I'd disagree with with this for the most part.
For those that have no talent, and no natural aptitude, no amount of training will make them 'good'. As an extreme example, take someone with an IQ of 50 - they will never play even at 1200 level, even if you forced them to study 10 hours per day.
On the other side, with talent, you need surprisingly small amounts of training to get to excellent levels. Magnus Carlsen was crushing accomplished adult tournament players with minimal study/training as a child with <2 years of casual chess experience under his belt.
For most people with 'average' talent, a ton of hard work is required to get to a strong level (whatever you define that is), but that doesn't mean it's required for everyone.
Likewise, odds are high that your professional stock trader friend had a highly inflated opinion of his aptitude and abilities given that pretty much no professional trader can outperform the market consistently for 10+ years. A lot get lucky for a few years, but that seems to be more luck than ability when dealing with the general stock market. (This is not true of however private equity or other nonpublic investments though where knowledge is opaque.)
"do you study?" and answer that they do puzzles and look at master games regularly. However, all of these players pretty much sit within a 100-point rating range that they vary within, but do not get better.
I talked with a guy who is a professional stock trader once. I asked him how long it would take him to teach me a little bit so I could trade stocks part time and make a little extra money. I told him that I am a total nerd and really get into these things, and would spend almost all of my free time learning whatever I needed to learn. He found my interest amusing, but said it wouldn't work out. He said unless I was willing to quit my job and come work for him for 10 years, I had no chance of learning how to trade stocks. Unless it's your day job, the thing that you spend the most time on every single day, the thing that you struggle with all day long, you can't be great at it.
Most people do not have any idea of the amount of work required to improve and be a top performer in a competitve endeavor. Doing tactics problems for 30 minutes per day and expecting to see real results is pie in the sky stuff for people with their head in the clouds. It's not how the real world works. There are plenty of fields filled with lazy people where hard workers can pick the low hanging fruit. Chess is not one of those fields. I don't know exactly what the number is, but I would guess it's around 3 hours. If you can't spend 3 hours per day consistently, I think making consistent progress will be very difficult, and even at 3 hours per day, progress will be slow.