Possible to get GM without being a child prodigy?

I suggest to shoot for easier titles first such as CM or NM as they are the lowest titles given. They are nothing like GM but you can get respect from these as well. Don't give up! 

#64
There is truth in the 10,000 hours, but you have to do the right thing. 10,000 hours memorising openings helps nothing. 10,000 hours of blitz and bullet helps nothing.
"I have only one talent: a talent for hard work" - Kasparov

No, there isn't really any truth in the 10,000 hours claim. First of all, it has already been debunked (in study by a Swedish scientist, Anders Ericsson). Secondly, define success. If memory serves me right, for chess they set the bar at E1800, which, while easily putting you in the top 10 per cent in the world, isn't that special. Thirdly, think about it, why 10,000 hours? Answer: Because it's a nice round number that Malcolm Gladwell just picked out of thin air for his Outliers: The Story of Success (Gladwell seems to have misinterpreted Ericsson's earlier work in several ways). It's a truly meaningless figure, because fourthly, and quite obviously, training is just as much a question of quality as of quantity. Finally, let's just take a closer look at the numbers. There are 8,760 hours in year. Regardless of whether you're working or going to school, you're likely to spend roughly 3,000 hours sleeping (8 hour/day) and between 1,600 and 2,000 hours at work or in school (8 hours a day, 5 days a week). That leaves another 3,500 to 4,000 hours free in a year. Presumably a lot of that time is going to be 'wasted' on other things, such as eating, watching television/being online, doing other sports or hobbies etc. So, for arguments sake say that we're able to spend 1,500 hours a year on chess. That's a lot of time, 4 hours/day on average. [By comparison, the Soviet Union ice-hockey players were said to spend that type of time training every year (and we know how hard they trained), while NHL players did about 900 hours, and professional footballers do about 1,000 hours per year.] To get those much-vaunted 10,000 hours in, it would take you more than six years.

Given how early many youngsters reach grandmaster level these days (while still sleeping, eating and going to school), it's obvious that 10,000 hours is utter bunkum. Looking at my own experience, I'm a half-decent player (with a peak Elo rating of nearly 2200), but I never entertained any pretentions of ever having had the talent to become a grandmaster (let alone world champion). I reached E1800 at the age of 17, having started to work seriously on my chess aged 13 (although I started attending a chess club aged 9), and only worked on my chess on weekends and during school holidays (so as not to impede school). It's obviously hard to estimate exactly how much time I spent, but given that I did a lot of other things as well, I probably only spent between 500 and 700 hours per year tops. This means that I achieved mastery in about 4.5 years, having spent less than 3,000 hours in total. By the time Fischer (who won the US championship aged 14), Kasparov, Carlsen, Karjakin, Caruana, Nakamura, So, Artemiev, Pragghnagandaa, Firouzja, and Abdusattorov – i.e. players with real talent for the game, not to mention a talent for hard work, and many of them with the support of the best coaches in the world – had spent 3,000 hours on chess, they were rated several hundred points above E1800. By the time they'd spent 10,000 hours on chess, they were already super grandmasters. In the particular case of Pragghnaganda, Firouzja and Abdusattorov, they've probably yet to reach the 10,000 hours.