Practice and passion are all you'll ever need (and food, sleep, etc.)

Well, taking a break from my Taiwan adventures, I feel the need to write about what's been occupying my mind during these days out in the heat. This is primarily in reaction to my having finished the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. That and my other sources will be mentioned at the end. This is just a blog so I won't be citing, but I did do some extra reading for this, all of which is available for everyone.
Now to my subject. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell dissects a host of modern success stories to discover what it was that made these people special. We tend to put people on pedastals, calling them geniuses or naturals. We see them as inherently gifted and that's why they're better than us. However, across the board, whether you're a chessmaster, a sportstar, an amazing guitarist, or the world's best programmer the one thing that really sets you apart is how much you've practiced. By all means you have to have been lucky enough to get the time and opportunities that made you successful, but by the end any innate ability is statistically insignificant. What often happens is adults perceive a child as special and then facilitate greater opportunities for that child, which over time actually makes that child better than others who weren't given the same help. We see this in everything from sports programs to gifted programs because we seem to believe people are better for one task or another, but in the end, time and time again, what actually matters is the time put into achievement.
The catch is how much time. 10,000 hours. If you want to be world class and reach extraordinary levels of skill, numerous studies across all sorts of disciplines consistently find the same numbers. If you just want to be good enough to teach and enjoy your discipline, perhaps even become a great teacher over time, you will probably have put in approximately 2000 hours of deliberate practice aimed at improvement, rather than just maintenance. Say you want to be really good though. To get a handle on nearly all the skill qnd knowledge base of a discipline you are looking at 7 to 8 thousand hours of deliberate, dedicated practice. You won't make it to the olympics, but you won't be far either. You won't come up with a new theory of the universe, but you'll really understand everyone else's. Yet, with the addition of roughly 2000 more hours, something magical happens. You'll assimilate your art. By this point you are no longer operating at seemingly normal levels of human performance. To anyone else you seem to be faster, smarter, more fluid, alltogether operating at another level. Your mind is actually functioning differently. You gain the ability to access your long term memory at times when others use short term. This larger storage gives you the ability to make faster and better educated decisions in the moment and to access huge amounts of experience to unite ideas and solve problems. What's amazing is that anyone can do this. You don't need a huge IQ or amazing reflexes. What you start training with will make the beginning harder or easier but in the end if you stick with it, it all evens out.
All research has been done with fields of expertise which have huge followings, often with the chance for professional involvement or world class competition. What about my passions which are not mainstream enough to have been studied. I am reasonably sure the past couple generations have seen hardly any martial artists reach this level. It simply isn't feasible without the support structure afforded to more commonplace disciplines. There is no profession or level of competitiom that requires or can support the amount of training for a traditional martial artist to get to this stage. Perhaps over the course of a lifetime, but without systematic practice as rigorous as in the first few years of training, improvement will slow until huge amounts of time pass without improvement, which will in turn decrease the amount of training one is willing to do. It has been shown that maintaining skill takes much less time, and that's what most skilled people will do. However, in the long run for our art to survive, we cannot only immortalize past masters and their skill, we must seek to reach those same levels so as to push forward our art and not let it stagnate and wither with time. Let's look at freerunning/parkour. The art is too new, and as anyone in the community knows, the skill level advances every week. The average Joe can do more moves than most of the world's best a few years ago. This is natural. No one, I'm willing to bet, perhaps not even the founders have hit the 10 000 hour mark. That requires ten years or more of dedicated training, constantly trying to perfect and improve. People are working towards that, and so the vocabulary of our movements is still expanding with the raised level of the group. Parkour benefits from the fact that so many other disciplines are applicable. If you have 1000 hours or more in breakdancing, gymnastics, or even martial arts, those hours will count; not completely, but they help. Just wait, in the next ten years, we'll see more and more guys we want to call prodigies, but really they will just have had the right amount and kind of training. We have no idea what's possible yet. Finally, I started studying german longsword when I was 11. I had an english teacher who was just getting involved in the new field of analyzing the old manuals and recreating the martial art. I could not have been luckier. It would be like being David Belle's kid brother ten years ago. I got involved with the art at almost the earliest possible time, and have had an advantage in practice time that I will admit I've been squandering the past few years. Were someone to hit the 10000 mark they would be resurrecting a dead art and be probably the first one to do so in more than 400 years.
Before I lay out my plans, I should summarize some of the research about how to train more effectively. First of all, all time spent dealing with things which involve your discipline help, but those ten thousand hours will be most easily and effectively reached by independent practice. The kind I'm talking about requires that you are focusing on your techniques, without worrying about anyone else, while attempting to perform whatever you are working on as well as you can. This drilling sort of practice should be self monitored and aiming to constantly improve some element of your performance. It is tiring, and more importantly, very little fun. The best in the world (at anything) can only do about an hour at a time, averaging three to 4 hours throughout the day. To recover and maintain this level of training, you need sufficient periods of rest and consistently good nights of more than 8 hours of sleep. Other hours can be accumulated with others or solo, for improvement or recreation. In general, if you are training for fun, it is most beneficial with others, whereas drilling to improve technique is best alone. Those dense hours of private training should always be exercising full effort and intent, basically holding nothing back. Every step of the way benefits from having coaches, teachers, or friends who can help monitor your technique and who you can seek for advice. Also, pure repition is insufficient for more advanced levels. Just repeating will lead to plateaus of skill level. Instead, you must devise systems to organise and reorganise your knowledge, constantly targeting aspects of training and performance to work and improve.
As for my plans, I have decided to reach the ten thousand hour mark in all three of my disciplines (languages would count but they're more complicated). I will strive for the pinnacles of skill in Northern Shaolin Kung Fu, Freerunning, and German Longsword. This is not because I'm special or deserve it, but because we all have the potential to do the same. To help anyone who feels the same way, I will be organizing practice sessions throughout the week, both to offer more dedicated times to improve and to enjoy our arts as a group. I will offer my own knowledge and coaching free of charge to anyone who wants it and is honestly dedicated to striving towards mastery in the long term. This is not a short term journey. Starting at 0 hours it can take no less than ten years of deliberate daily improvement to attain the levels I'm talking about. In order to be sure, I will disregard my years of experience and for myself start logging my hours from 0. I recommend anyone attending my practices to keep logs of personal practice, and notebooks in which you can systemize your art. Start now but remember if you can only do ten minutes at a time that's fine, just mark that down. As time goes on I will provide more information on workouts and get togethers. As for how I plan to survive with this level of dedication, I have all sorts of plans, but I recommend creativity and perseverence. I don't want to be mediocre. I practice these arts because I love them; no matter what else I pursue or encounter my knowledge and experience gained from these disciplines has pulled me through physically and psychologically. Research shows the passion required to attain this eminence should not be obsessive, defined as a need to appear better than others or arising from insecurities about oneself, but must become passion to excel for its own sake, a healthy striving.

Please read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, whose sources I later plundered to right this. In it you'll find enough of the research and all of the inspiration to set out on a journey to become an outlier. Also he adresses many questions of environmental influences, such as culture and era which should be better understood by everyone. You might know how much of a strict fan of copyright laws I am, so you know I'd definitely not send a .pdf version of the book to anyone who asked for it.
If you wanna see the research, I can send pdfs of the published relevant papers. They're long, took almost as long as the book to get through.