i stubbled upon this video in my feed. This video perfectly explain your overall problem if you can't progress.. even for me honestly a must watch : he even reference about Chess Grandmaster
I think the main problem with talks (and articles, etc) like this is that it references people who are "the best" at something. A lot of people who are "the best" at something, have some kind of innate ability that enables them to be really good at something. Whether that is having a natural skill or affinity for a certain thing, or just being good at learning new skills, it seriously distorts the things they did to become the best in favour of their personal traits, while their methods (like hanging a sword above your shoulder) are seen as gospel by and for the general public, who might not share any of these traits, and the methods would be completely ineffective. Consider for example a man with a lot of natural body mass. For someone like that, just going to the gym would translate in almost immediate results in terms of muscle tone. They could become "the best" body builder, and when you asked them what they did to become the best, they might answer something tangentially related like "eat 10 raw eggs each morning". In reality, their natural predisposition for body mass retention (which translates in fat when passive, and muscle tone when fit and active) combined with exercise would be the main reason they became "the best" body builder. If someone with a very fast metabolism and low body mass tried the same, they would just have the shits constantly because of all the undigested egg protein in their bowels. I am personally very good at gaining and retaining specific knowledge. If you ask me what I did to become an expert at video engineering, or colour grading, I would just say "forget about books and tutorials, and just start doing it, you will pick up the knowledge along the way". Of course, for most people that will not work at all. There are a reason there are books and tutorials; they're just completely unnecessary for someone like me. And conversely, it took me a very long time to become mediocre at TGM, because of my predisposition towards knowledge as opposed to practical skills involving manual dexterity and high speed puzzle solving like Tetris. If I copied the methods that Kevin or Jago or Kan used to become good at TGM, I would probably see marginal improvement over just practising like I do now.
I think the issue is that the better you get, the harder it becomes to improve, to the point that plateaus are almost impossible to overcome (to say it in a more positive way: handling them becomes an increasing large part of the challenge itself): you have to understand too many things. Why are you stagnating? What is wrong in what you do? How can you figure out what doesn't work? Do you have bad habits and if so, how to eliminate them? What is improvable and what is not? What is the correct balance between learning and practicing?. I ask the last question because of the video: the author says you really learn only during "learning time" or so. That's not that simple. For example I had reached death 500 for the first time in summer 2009, and performed my first death M at the end of march 2010. And I did practice every day at the time. With the exception of a couple sessions I made in order to get rid of double tapping and improve finess instead, I have hardly learned anything during the process. I've just played insane nonsensical amounts of games. What did happen is simply the fact I was too slow, and gaining speed gradually until I could bruteforce the game and get through the barrier was in my case a matter of practice. Unless you have clearly unfit moves in what you do and need to fix malpractice, you will never improve things like speed, accuracy, hand eye coordination by reading books or "understanding things". For what it's worth I think that every chess player (understand: people who actually care about that game, not casual players) is repeating himself all the time "I wish I was better"... Since plateauing is very common and If you aren't Magnus Carlsen himself or one of the very very few guys who have comparable skill, then you can always find someone who will outplay you, consistently.
I also particularly hate video that praise "successful people" skills, for what you described. But i like the concept in this video about the training zone and the performance zone : "Training <> playing" is something we already pointed out (imo) many time over the years for people who plateauing. For a very long time i was thinking, anybody could become Gm and overcome many difficulties from the game. But after years i came to reconsider my point of view.. Of course there are a lot of external factor that prevent someone to get interest or addicted to the game. But i came to conclusion it effectively require some "innate ability" to get above of the melee.. I'm not better successful in life than other (surely not), but my "success" in TGM came from an ability i developped playing "killer instinct" : a curiosity for deeply analysing/asserting/theorising unknow rules for games i cared. But i don't get much satisfaction to master games already "fully documented". That's probably why i only got very good at Killer Instinct and TGM only.
