The original author is actually wrong..especially using his chess analogy. Incremental improvements will get you nowhere.
The best way to raise your chess game is to play against people who are faaar better than you. Do this for one week, and you will find yourself crushing your [former] peers.
Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)
Brain scans on domain-specific experts (math and chess are domain-specific skills) have shown activation in areas that store episodic memory. What this means, is that a large part of the "expertness" comes from efficient retrieval from long term memory (a fast pipeline between RAM and HDD, if you will). Writing to HDD, in the brain at least, is usually an incremental process.
I am not a chess player, but in go, this makes perfect sense. You start with the most basic strategies and build on them as you advance. If the skill gap is too wide you'd probably drown in confusion trying to take apart what is going on.
Granted, it's not black and white. If you're smart you'd be able to take bigger jumps and piece together several steps with each jump, in which case, for you, playing somebody faaar better is simply a reasonable next step for you, but relative to your skill level it's still a "slow" process.
The original author is arguably the world's best mathematician. He certainly hasn't gone nowhere. It may be worth considering that he knows what he's talking about.
I will have to disagree with you there. If the gap between you and your coworker/chessopponent is too great there are no lessons learned. Trying to assimilate knowledge too fast will only lead to superficial understanding and frustration.
I think it doesn't matter if you play people who are slightly better or far better players than you are. The secret is getting your ass kicked as often as possible.
Using the same analogy, Mark Zuckerberg should have beeen aiming to build facebook into a 10 million dollar company (or something)