Your Road To Grandmaster

If becoming a titled chess player is on your to-do list, these are some best practices on your road to success:

• Start playing chess at young age, the younger the better. If you are already beyond this, it still may not be too late. If you are a parent consider this for your children. 
• Starting early is one thing, staying motivated over long periods of time another thing. Fun during learning definitely helps staying committed.
• Once you feel "stuck" you need a coach! Once you have reached a certain level it is very hard to make significant progress (most titled players had several excellent private coaches in their career). A coach sees your play from outside, he or she is not affected by blind spots as you might be. Ideally the coach should have a rating 300-500 points higher than yours to be able to teach you something, but also to be somewhat connected to the issues at your level.
• If there is no coach (yet), there is still plenty of things you can and should do:
  • Tactics: Puzzle rush, tactics trainer, tactics theory.
  • Practice: The more often you play and practice the better.
  • Learn from your mistakes: whenever you finish a game, analyze and look at your and your opponent's mistakes and learn from them.
  • Annotate your own games, blog on them (this will force you to go through them very detailed).
  • Watch & learn (e.g. tournament or educational streams).

  • Endgame practice.

  • ...
• After having improved your tactical play the next thing on your list is to improve your positional play:
  • how to create a regional dominance (left, right or center?)
  • how to create a dominance on black/white fields (on which?)
  • how to gain tempo
  • how to transition into a won endgame
  • ...
• Finally you'll need to enrich your opening repertoire. While at the beginning playing the same 3 openings over and over again, at some point you'll need more variety so that your opponent has a harder time preparing against you.
• Preparation: when it comes to playing against titled players you need to look at their game history and assess their opening repertoire and their weaknesses and exploit them.

This list by no means is exhaustive, it's rather meant as food for thought. Please add additional advice on how to become a titled player in the comments section.

Cheers.