> I’m sure practicing chess moves intentionally with no repercussions makes you a great chess player pretty quickly.
I have a related idea I call "10-100-10k", based on my loose interpretation of the "10 000 hours" meme. It goes like this: 10 hours is a lot of time. It's 20 pomodoros. At the same time, it's very little time, something you can easily fit in your schedule over a week or two. So if there's a skill you find yourself wishing you'd have, no matter how trivial, allocate 10 hours for deliberate practice of the basics. There's a good chance you'll quickly progress and reach a qualitatively higher level of performance in just those 10 hours. And at that point, you can decide whether the skill is worth developing further (leading to the "100" part, being "100 hours"), or whether what you have is good enough for you.
For anyone that hasn't heard, the "10 thousand hour" catch phrase was created be Malcom Gladwell in his book [Outliers], when Malcom misunderstood the research results of Anders Ericsson.
Ericsson has gone so far as to dedicate an entire six-page section in his 2017 book [Peak] to a discussion of [Outliers]'s popularization of the catch phrase "the ten thousand hour rule". In the section he lists three reasons why this phrase is misleading, and one way in which it is accurate.
The central theme of [Peak] is to review what things all experts have in common, irrespective of their varied fields: these being a habit of deliberate, purposeful practice and mental maps.
[Peak] Peak: Secrets from the new science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
I have a related idea I call "10-100-10k", based on my loose interpretation of the "10 000 hours" meme. It goes like this: 10 hours is a lot of time. It's 20 pomodoros. At the same time, it's very little time, something you can easily fit in your schedule over a week or two. So if there's a skill you find yourself wishing you'd have, no matter how trivial, allocate 10 hours for deliberate practice of the basics. There's a good chance you'll quickly progress and reach a qualitatively higher level of performance in just those 10 hours. And at that point, you can decide whether the skill is worth developing further (leading to the "100" part, being "100 hours"), or whether what you have is good enough for you.