This is a good topic...let's see what ppl have to say....some people here on the forums believe you cannot improve beyond a certain point, no matter what you do.
Getting better at Chess by 'deliberate practice.'
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Further on 'deliberate practice'.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391794/
Oct 11, 2016
0
#5
who can afford 3hours of chess each day? now you understand there is very few masters around
Very true on the ~10,000 hours of focused practice to become a master at your chosen discipline. (at least from all the research I have seen.)
The good news is that to become "decent" or average at something only requires 100 or so hours. We will never master everything. Who has the time? But you can become good enough to enjoy the activity with about 100 hours of focused practice.
Not sure I added anything to the discussion. I find the 10,000 hours overwhelming but if I can take it 100 hours at a time it seems more achievable. Eat the elephant one bit at a time.
*becoming a chess master is not my goal. Being good enough to enjoy the game is what I am after.*
Practice style is crucial.
Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment.
Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight.
"Across the board, these last two variables -- practice style and practice time -- emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.'
First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. 'Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs from mere experience and mindless drill,' explains Ericsson. 'Unlike playful engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It ... does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts to reach beyond one's current level, which is associated with frequent failures.' ..
"In other words, it is practice that doesn't take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice where the individual keeps raising the bar of what he or she considers success. ...
"[This type of practice] requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again. ...
"The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of elapsed time -- not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day, Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day).
(ED: 10,950 hours if calculated at 3 hours * 365 * 10 -- not including leap years)
From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark."